Artist Residency Pouch Cove – Making Art in Newfoundland

On the heels of a residency at The Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, I am pleased to share I will be making art in Newfoundland in October 2023. The Board of Directors of the Pouch Cove Foundation awarded me a residency at the Foundation’s facilities in Newfoundland for the month of October. One of many beautiful things about this opportunity is it will allow me to fill in the gaps in a body of work I have been creating about Canada for more than a decade now. I have been on a journey across Canada looking to understand my land and what it truly means to be ‘Canadian’. My paintings are part biography and part storytelling. I am painting about my experiences and what I see, touch, taste, feel and hear, and I am also painting stories of these travels in Canada. What informed my work began with ‘popular culture’ and stereotype. Over the years I became more interested in ‘authentic experiences’ and I began to travel to gain a true understanding of the collective Canadian consciousness, and in returning home to Vancouver Island, a better understanding of the culture in which I was raised.

Originally a fishing community, Pouch Cove is now principally a dormitory town for people working in the city and home to a large retirement population. It is at the northern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the eastern edge of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is a town whose motto is, ‘first to see the sun’, as it is the first place that wakes up each morning in Canada. As a Canadian living at the western-most point in Canada, and the last to see the sun, I am excited to delve into the differences and perhaps, similarities, found on both coasts of Canada. Having spent time in Yellowknife, NWT during midnight sun time of year, it will also be quite the contrast to my past Canadian explorations. See you on the eastern tip of Canada in Fall 2023!