Honoring Ghosts & The Nature of Grief | Amberlie Perkin
Amberlie Perkin’s art practice involves listening to ghosts. Drawn to the interplay of grief and ecology, her thesis project Honoring Ghosts & The Nature of Grief explores wounded ecologies in relation to both the human body and our non-human kin in this time of environmental degradation and accelerated extinctions. Perkin’s artwork examines how curious and embodied engagement with the natural environment can provide a visual and material language to articulate the complex and often abstract emotions of grieving. Her process enacts the materiality of mourning and metamorphosis, while exploring the regenerative potential of death to animate new growth in the natural world and our lives. Perkin’s installations are an invitation to make metaphoric connections to nature, to feel, to remember, and to commune with ghosts.
This yearlong thesis project culminated in her final exhibition which included:
Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild
Tracing Your Ghost II
Lichen Collagraph Print Series
Honoring Ghosts & The Nature of Grief
Thesis Installaion. Sculptural works: Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild, and Tracing Your Ghost II.
Tracing Your Ghost II. 2020. Thesis Installation. Sculptural works created with relief prints of fragmented tree stumps, ponderosa pine bark & lichen on rice paper.
Lichen Collagraph Print Series, 2020. Thesis Installation. Artworks on either end of the triptych are 2 collagraph prints layered together.
Listen Now to The Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild
Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild. 2020. Thesis Installation. Sculptural works, variable dimensions. Chicken wire, paper mache, acrylic paint, and relief prints of tree stumps, pine bark & lichen on rice paper.
Tracing Your Ghost II
ABOUT AMBERLIE PERKIN
Amberlie Perkin is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator. Her artwork investigates place, history, grief, and wounded ecologies. Perkin’s diverse practice is deeply rooted in the embodied experience of engaging with nature and physically exploring sites which have been altered, often detrimentally, by human industrial interventions. She is drawn to abandoned or wounded landscapes, searching for their histories, remnants, and ghosts. Her practice celebrates kinship while offering a poetic lamentation of our complex relationship with the natural environment.
Amberlie Perkin holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2010), a Bachelor of Education from Simon Fraser University (2011), and a Master of Visual Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2020). She has exhibited both locally and internationally.
IG: @amberlieperkinart
Taryn Sheppard
A_Total Fabrication
Taryn Sheppard’s work explores architecture and the perception of space in the context of digital culture. She is interested in the subliminal influence of the digital on our perception of space and uses digital-to-analog processes to explore this relationship. Her work includes oil paintings based on computer rendering, robotic drawing, ceramic printing and other digital fabrication techniques.
Taryn Sheppard’s thesis work ‘A_Total Fabrication’ explores the deeper meaning of the formal language of architecture and its’ effect on the perception of our built environment. This installation looks at the visual language of postmodern institutional architecture and recontextualizes elements like volume, texture, and material into a surreal ‘room’. These architectural elements have been put through a process of mediation from digital to analog which highlights the faultiness of memory and creates questions about our perception of reality in the context of digital culture.
The installation is composed of three elements:
- ‘A Total Fabrication’ (Painting), 80″x48″, Oil on Wood Panel, 2020.
- ‘Glass Blocks’, Approx. 10’x10’x8′, Ink on Vellum, 2020.
- ‘Pink Granite’, Approx. 12’x20′, Found Nylon Carpet, Acrylic.
Other Works
Below: Exhibition of work as part of ‘KAIROS’ Interim Graduate show at Micheal O’Brien Exhibition Commons, September 2019.
- A Space Modelled From Memory One, 48″ x 48″ Oil on Wood Panel, 2019.
- A Space Modelled From Memory Two, 48″ x 48″ Oil on Wood Panel, 2019.
- A Space Modelled From Memory Three, 60″ x 60″ Oil on Wood Panel, 2019.
- Porcelain House, 3D Printed Porcelain, 2019.
Below Left: ‘Hollow’, 36″ x 48″, Oil on Wood Panel, 2019.
Below Right: ‘Threshold’, 80″ x 58″, Watercolour Ink on Paper, 2019.
About
Taryn Sheppard is a Vancouver based artist and architect. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto (Master in Architecture, ‘10) and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (Bachelor of Fine Arts, ‘05).
She is a cofounder of Woodford Sheppard Architecture based in her home province of Newfoundland & Labrador, who have completed numerous award winning projects in the coastal Atlantic region and have been published in international magazines including Dezeen and The Globe and Mail Arts.
Taryn has contributed critical writing on the built environment to a variety of publications including Canadian Architect, Riddle Fence Arts Journal and The Scope Arts Magazine. She has been a guest lecturer at a variety of conferences and universities and an advising member on a variety of boards and associations in Canada, including the Canada Council For the Arts, the Newfoundland & Labrador Association of Architects and the City of St. John’s Heritage Advisory Board.
Taryn is currently establishing her studio practice in Vancouver with a research focus on architecture and digital culture, and is conducting research in digital fabrication with the Material Matters Research Centre at ECUAD.
A CASE OF CLASS WAR / Ben Lee
My work is defined by deliberate dissidence to the dissonance of corporate warfare.
Rebecca Bair
PRESSED - RELEASED (2020)
PRESSED – RELEASED (2020) investigates the aesthetic, technical and symbolic differences between two types of print media techniques. These techniques and their processes are suggested through their visual representation, and insinuated through their naming.
On the left is PRESSED (2020) – a monotype print.
On the right is RELEASED (2020) – a digital photograph.
This project was awarded the Opus Art Supplies Graduation Award (MFA), and received an Honourable Mention for ECU Graduation Award for Anti-Racism and Social Justice in Visual Arts.
For We Are the Children of The Sun is a thesis project which aims to utilize abstraction and non-figuration as methods of representation for Black Women on Turtle Island. Through a personal contemplation of identity and ancestry, symbols such as hair and the Sun function as connectors to the plurality of Blackness. Bair examines and refutes what it means to be ‘Canadian’, and turns to a diasporic community which extends past the borders of land. Her objective is to re-imagine representation for the Black Woman, and to center resilience and community as primary concerns through a collaboration with the Sun. Sky Light is the most recent visualization of this pursuit.
SKY LIGHT (2020)
This content makes up a digital maquette of the proposed final piece.
Figments, Filaments, and Pigments | Emma H. Baldwin
Ch-ch-changes
Ch-ch-changes
A body of work that is moving away from paper, watercolour, and graduate school and into the personal, three dimensional, and the even more breakable.
Milking in the Bones
Fine Rise
A Second Child
Egg Eye Cage
A First Child
The Ecosphere– A Fantastical Exploration
Joyful Making in Perilous Times / Carlyn Yandle
What may seem like a fuzzy retreat from perilous personal, local, and global realities is in fact a tactile, humane action to seek alternatives. ‘Scaffolds’, ‘Resurge’ and ‘Hearth’ represent one year of material explorations in a world of hazardous objects and conditions, intertwining the gathering of found materials, rote hand-making and community engagement.
This project was awarded the Renée Van Halm + Pietro Widmer Graduation Award for Visual Arts
@carlynyandle • carlynyandle.com
'Scaffolds':
'Resurge':
'Hearth':
Unknown Distance | Emma Burry
Artist Statement
The horizon is a visual example of a distance that is physically unreachable. I define the horizon is an in-between space that we can perceive, but never physically reach. I believe that this is where longing resides. Longing for people, places, things, or communities that are somehow lost or unreachable. That is where my practice lives, within the distance between physical and metaphorical, interpersonal and introspective. Through labour and craft I explore longing for people, places, and communities that are out of reach.
Unknown Distance |
Project Statement
Unknown Distance was a project created during the summer of 2019. Between my two years at Emily Carr University I was thinking a lot about distance and time and their relationship with longing.
Through the use of my body I wanted to explore the repetitive nature of longing; how your mind drifts between yourself (reality) and the longed for (memory). I decided to see if the metaphorical weight of that pacing could be seen through the layering of a physical action (in this case walking) across shipping skids.
The wood creaked, cracked, snapped and bowed under my feet. The paint and wood recording all the passes as I walked back and forth. The continued tension and accumulation of “memory” becoming too much for it to handle. Unknown Distance refers to both the unknown distances the skids traversed before I found them and also the distances I’ve been exploring both metaphorically and physically through my own experiences of longing.
Artist Bio
Emma Burry is an interdisciplinary artist of settler and indigenous descent from the island of Newfoundland, Canada. She has spent much of her life just steps from the ocean which greatly influences her art practice. Emma has graduated from the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University and is now a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts degree at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Emma Burry was the 2018 provincial winner of the BMO 1st Art! Award for Newfoundland. Emma has a diverse exhibition history, showing her work across Canada and also in the UK.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emmalburryart
Instagram: @emmaburryart
Transmutations of Emotional Energy: Ceramics, Fibre, and Flesh | Malina Sintnicolaas
This work explores the ways in which emotional energy, such as sentiments associated with depression, trauma, and anxiety, can be represented in a physical form with the mediums of ceramic and fibre sculpture. It discusses the ways in which using these materials’ properties can represent the complexities of these vibrations. When treating mood disorders or mental illness, when you are able to imagine something abstract like emotions as an image, form or object, it brings validity to it, and it brings something easy to visualize in order to work on ways to treat it. Therefore, with this work, I am questioning the ways in which this can be done with sculpture, and to create a dialogue, not for the viewer to connect with the specific emotion but rather to open up a space for contemplation of our interior lives that are often too elusive to share other than through material, abstract and affective works of art.
ABOUT MALINA SINTNICOLAAS
Malina Sintnicolaas is a sculptural artist currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With a practice focused mostly in ceramic, and fibre sculpture, her works are considered to be manifestations, transmutations, or “petrifications” of emotions into a physical form. Her practice is focused in ceramic sculpture due to the tactile nature of the material, the reciprocity of the medium which allows for a physical recording and translation of a gesture, and the immediate occupation of space. Both fibre and ceramics are materials that have an interesting contrast in properties, that they can be so strong yet so fragile at the same time, which correlates to the subject matter of her work, because like the materials, the human psyche is fragile, unpredictable, and difficult to maintain. Drawn to tactile materials, her work is questioning ways in which one can represent emotions such as depression, trauma, and anxiety with a physical form and in what was can one induce empathy for an object even if that object is alien or abstract. Working with texture, surface, material properties, and form, her sculptures are bodily, visceral, and drive to evoke feeling from the viewer, using affect to create an empathic landscape that will urge an understanding for states of mind which are difficult to be described verbally. She received her B.F.A from York University, and is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is the recipient of the 2019 Audain Travel Award; the Won Lee Scholarship from the Sculpture Society of Canada, and has shown work in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
https://www.instagram.com/malinasintnicolaas/
Wyobrażony Dom - The Imagined Home | Angelica Brzyska
Angelica Brzyska’s thesis project Ghosts of the Home: Unfolded Pasts & Traces of the Old Country explores the experiences of people with cross-cultural identities. The core of Brzyska’s practice draws from her Polish-Canadian identity, specifically the material exploration of paper through printmaking, the Polish folk art called wycinanki and installation. Nostalgia haunts the work which references her early childhood, a time when she felt the strongest connection to her Polish heritage and before she began to assimilate into Canadian culture. The tactility of printmaking and paper cutting’s repetitive actions allows Brzyska to remember the place of childhood thereby bridging the gap between her identities.
A Room for Projection and Reflection | Romane Bladou
In this work, imagination, reflection and projection are interpreted both as methods in looking and as inner spaces; they are ways to see and ways to be. States of mind and of vision are explored through observation and introspection. Walking, transit and travel are ways employed to allow a slowness in looking and the opportunity to daydream. These experiences in space and time are recorded here through still framed videography. I built an installation in which this translation from moment to media is displayed to create immersion, or rather the illusion of it. The apparatus being so present in the space allows us to focus on the shadows, reflections and projections, the usually overlooked. In the multimedia installation, the gallery becomes a space in which to reflect and project: it too allows a slowness in looking, thinking and noticing.
(if you scroll all the way down, you can find an excerpt of the work A Window to Hold Shadows)
