I joined an artists' group at the beginning of the year. It's been a good group of monthly meetings, with discussions, questions, resource sharing and more. One theme/highlight has been the presentations of each artist's practice. My month to share was this month, which worked out well for me, as I had a chance to reflect on what I do.
It was an interesting process to explain my practice. Here is what I told people:
I draw, but don't have a regular drawing practice. Drawing is not quite like riding a bicycle, the muscles need to be reminded of what to do each time I start up. When I draw, I have a good time, and then I move on to something else.
It would be lovely to have a sustained drawing practice, but there are so many other fun things to do, like painting...
...digital art...
... knitting, embrodiery, decorative painting, and learning new techniques whenever I can.
I've had some success commercially, designing street banners on three separate occasions for the Resort Municipality of Whistler, but the majority of art that I make has been largely for family and friends.
In 2008, I had a chance to go to school and take formal academic art classes, graduating with a Fine Arts Certificate from the College of New Caledonia. By this time, I was working with fabric, making quilts, and was fortunate that some of my instructors did not insist on traditional paint, pencil and charcoal to complete my assignments.
This gave me the courage to submit fabric art to the local public gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, for the group exhibition Drawn in 2009. ReDefining HerSelf was accepted and also went on to another group exhibition at the Federation of Canadian Artists in 2012.
I followed that up a few years later with my quilted piece, GeSchichten, during the Earthly group exhibition at Two Rivers Gallery in 2014.
In 2009, I was part of a Secret Santa exchange and my recipient was somebody I did not know very well. All I knew was that he was extremely talented at doing all things "handyman", and that he always wore a grey woolen toque. This was my first foray into personalized soft sculptures:
After graduating from CNC, I began a Masters of Education in Arts Based Education. It was a project-based program, which means that artwork, as well as written papers, was expected to portray our learning. My soft sculptures took a different turn after an emotionally charged class on labels.
Click here to read more about that event.
I continued to make more dolls after that program, concentrating on people's personalities as I did so.
Three of those dolls were accepted into various group exhibitions in 2015, 2016 and 2019.
I've been encouraged by those successes and now have a big dream - to have a solo exhibition of my dolls. There are not yet enough of them, but I am slowly getting there."
A curator in our Artist Connect group encouraged me to find a smaller gallery and start off there. That way I don't feel compelled to wait until I have a large number of dolls to display. She said that I can continue to grow the collection over the years and move into bigger spaces as the collection grows.
Her words definitely gave me something to think on. I may have a start on next year's objectives... I know for sure that I will sign up for the Artist Connect group again next year. It has been an enriching experience with a supportive group of fellow artists. I look forward to next year's discussions.
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