Body Space Object – NIC student experience + presentation at CVAG
North Island College Fine Arts students return to the gallery in 2022 for onsite experience at CVAG. Students install, present, document and write about their work emerging out of their ‘body, space, object’ thematic research from the FIN 231 Sculpture and Integrated Art Practices course during the winter semester. Working in the Gallery’s spaces: Gather Place and the George Sawchuk Gallery, the students have the opportunity to experiment, innovate, and grow their creative practice.
Anne Cumming
Inspired by bodily gestures, and frustrated by the constraints of the written word, I explore how I can express human emotion through small sculptures and charcoal drawings. I use photography to capture relationships among the sculptures, which are placed in different configurations and settings to document effects on the sculptures’ stories. In my work, I am looking for a geography of expression that can house the struggles of written and visual expression.
Desiderium is a theatrical tableau of entities centred around a figure in their dying moments, each with its own role to play as the person passes from life to death. Passing no judgement, the entities represent the psyche’s experiences: the ineffable, the ecstatic, the deepest darkness, memory, and what has been repressed from memory. There is no weighing of the soul, no threat of purgatory.
This tableau is a smaller part of a piece called The Procession, in which a fuller range of chthonic, animistic, and ethereal entities appear to support at ritual moments in a person’s life. Every entity in this tableau begins with a wire armature, wire capable of carrying an (imaginary) electrical charge that is sent and received by all the entities as they gather around the dying figure, creating an energetic cradle. Placed on three plinths in small groupings, each grouping is a part of the whole narrative, but also tells its own stories. In front of the three plinths are wooden crates. Entities are free to enter or leave the tableau, move in and out of the crates, in and out of the stories, providing their succulence to the dying figure and to one another.
Kimberly Holmes
I make films, paintings and drawings. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, I absorb the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation, in this way trauma and healing are woven together to create a story through film.
Kimberly Holmes’ films are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true, and the truth exists–but it has many faces.
Welcome Home is a collage from a short video series crafted by Kimberly. The video is an exploration of memory, familiarity and generational impact. Each video is a series of memories using an abstract story method, based mostly in body memory rather than depicting actual events.
Marlee Munro
I wish to respectfully acknowledge that I live, learn, and create on the Unceded Territory of the Pentlatch and K’ómoks First Nation. As a student at the School of Fine Art and Design at North Island College, I am leaning into expanding my research and material practices alongside cultivating my social and land-based practices. I enjoy the freedom of working with my hands and improvisation. Topics of interest include growth, decay, movement, and change.
My film, titled Inner Fieldwork (2021), documents a durational inquiry into incorporating improvised body movement into my practice through encounters and interventions in site-specific locations. This video was developed as a witness to my ongoing research into how making things can be associated with movement, and improvisation, to amplify meaning and form a web of connections.
My installation, titled In my Heart (2021), is an outcome of my ongoing study of the relationship between body and space, linking questions surrounding how we support, honour, respect, and make space for one another within a community. This project was my introduction to porcelain slip-casting and raku firing processes, as well as the practice of burning marks using horsehair. My amulet-like figures, inspired by early Cycladic sculptures, are part of a project developed in response to research surrounding the phenomena of relation. The energy and space between the figures is magnified, inviting the viewer to imagine a story of human connection.
Freddie Milne
Hi, I’m Freddie from Wales. I am 20 years old. I first became interested in art in late 2017, I began to teach myself how to draw to have an activity to distract my muddled mind with a long term goal of acquiring the skill to express myself through art visually. I first studied Fine Art at Coleg Sir Gar: Graig campus, Wales. Moving to Canada in 2019 I took a year off from the arts, now I am in my second year of the NIC Fine Arts Diploma. I am a big fan of picking up new skills and mediums. My primary mediums are painting, sculpture, india ink, film, music and digital art. I now create art to push my skills and to express my mind, emotions, ideology and I wish to make the expressions of my mind interesting and narrative heavy to inspire and interest others.
This is a costume from my short film: Keno. This is the state that the Keno protection [mark I] suit is in after the events of Keno. Empty, discarded, no longer in need, nor able to serve a use anymore. Its purpose to protect the occupant from the outside world, from the judgmental gaze from on-lookers still reaches the occupant but with face and body obscured, the look carries no weight, it is seen but not felt, for they do not know who it is directed towards. Although the man in the suit is the man in the suit, no one will recognize you from with it on, or with it off. To wear this suit publicly is to make yourself a spectacle, yet no one sees you, everyone looks but no one can recognize you. But this suit also blocked the companionship, with a hidden body it is harder to make a connection, hiding your whole self makes people anxious. One arm occupied with something comforting and the other with a weak, man-made, machine aided arm, you can reach further, but it is limited in gesture, and its touch has no warmth. This suit not only blocks the world’s judgment, it not only isolates the world from yourself, but it isolates yourself from others, it blocks out your warmth. And as such, its purpose is worn out. This suit is self-defeated.
Renée Poisson
from the ground to the ground
rising and falling on the skin of winter
Falling has been my experiential approach to facing aging and death. Death is one thing, aging is another.
I have been fascinated by the possibilities of voluntary falling, that I could choose to fall as I could choose to jump and do it without disaster. I could learn to release and let everything go to gravity without breaking.
When it became real to me that most of my life was behind me with a small portion ahead, at best, I wanted to face my mortality rather than seek comfort in denial. I centered my physical inquiry on the moment of impact, my body meeting the ground. To be vertical and then to be a shape along the ground, part of the earth absorbed into the earth. Flat on the ground the smells of the earth, plants, the tiny movements of insects become reality. An extraordinary world.
My focus shifted as practicing the fall led me to a deeper experience of being alive; the body urge to get up became its own exploration. How to get up from a fall. The difficulties of getting up. The strength needed. The problems of weakness. Many years older than when I began this probing, I experience changes in my body, how the skin and muscle hang away from the bones, and movement that was easy is now challenging. Our society tells me that as I am old I must fear falling: it is dangerous. Disastrous. Contending with these societal injections of fear and helplessness, I look at the interesting challenges of being upright and fallen.
I choose to fall on soft ground. I get up from anywhere I am down. Getting up is a daily act. Getting up from sleep. Getting up from injury. From depression. From exhaustion. From despair. Getting up when you think you can’t. Getting up might be opening an eye. An ear. Taking a breath in.
All my work is embedded in the landscape I inhabit. Unconsciously deep inner reality does not give me a choice in this.
Video is my witness, the projection is a way of expressing my body language on the present territory of winter. My summer falls now appear on the complex snow skin territory. Flimsy strips and thin poly drop sheets carry the movement of the air as the snow falls. Wind and Spirit.
The old body falls and rises as the seasons turn.
Demara Wilding
Hi, I’m Demara Wilding. I think I’m gonna start off with brutal honesty haha. I was a weird kid. I didn’t have many friends and was full of anxiety. So much that all I would do is draw on myself. There wasn’t a day I would come home from school without drawings all up my arms. My mom and teachers hated that I would rather draw than pay attention but for some reasons I didn’t care, it just made me so happy. On the first day of art class the teacher said that she would prefer if we drew while we did our lessons and I was never so grateful in my life. I started really getting into art in high school, we had this amazing art teacher Mr. Randall. He got me to really push myself and start enjoying the world of art. The best thing about the art world is you can be as weird as you want because there is someone out there just as weird as you if not weirder to enjoy your work. Usually when I make art it’s for other people but recently, I’ve been trying to use my art as a way of understanding myself. It’s definitely hard making art for yourself because you only have to worry about what would you like? What do you want to do? But once you start thinking about yourself in your art it becomes so much more personal and I find myself getting attracted to artworks. I’m so glad I took this path. I don’t think I would be myself without art.
This project came to me at a weird time in my life. I was really depressed after a fresh break up and couldn’t really get my head around school. After taking my sweet time moping around I needed to start working on my projects. Still finding it hard to do just about anything I sat in my bed and drew. My break up was because of Male masculinity and my ex not being comfortable with his sexuality. After realizing this I went online to try and understand why men feel so ashamed of being anything other than a “man”. I still find it so hard to understand why men are so afraid of being feminine, the only reason I got basically is they’re afraid of what other men think. As I was painting these nudes I got many questions of why would I paint men like that, questions I had never gotten when I painted naked women. People aren’t used to seeing men this way, but they are just as beautiful and gentle as any woman. The human form is so beautiful, why do we need all these unsaid rules about how to portray them. Do what makes you happy and only worry about what you want for yourself.
Rosemary Bockner
Drawing is the core of my art practice; naked freedom in dialogue with line. Art for me is an act of resistance against the intellect dominating the feeling body. Feeling is part of my process as it wells up and becomes marks on a page in an act of vulnerability and exploration of dark, difficult, beautiful and raw experience.
My creative practice extends beyond the intimate act of drawing to intersect with the digital life of the photograph; the lens pointed at me as the subject. I am aware of the refracted gaze of technology. I become engaged in a cyclical play of reflection, response and unconscious mark making, a delicate balance between the digital and the raw human. The imagery is reworked over and over, exploring and acknowledging the self in a constant state flux.
Discomfort is essential in remaining vulnerable, my own body and my own gaze both confront and hide from the viewer to reclaim female sexuality, transgression of sexual taboos, the horror of birth and the ambivalence of motherhood; the damaged post-childbearing body that I live. Every time I make a work I surrender to the wisdom of the feeling body creating beauty out of trauma.
Rosemary Bockner is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the themes of embodiment, erotica, motherhood and the constant flux of identity. Her creative practice is grounded in drawing that experiments and envelopes digital print, collage, illustration, photography and illustration. Her work in the cultural sector includes teaching art in marginalized communities, collective curatorial event planning, design and illustration. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, a Certificate in Comics and Graphic Novels from Camosun College, and a Diploma in Community, Family and Child Studies from Camosun College.