Elvira Hufschmid's recorded interview is now ready for viewing for those who missed her online Zoom interview on Thursday, March 13th, 2023.
Visit the UN/making Network YouTube Channel to watch, listen or share. 

 

Elvira Hufschmid is a queer migrant artist of German ancestry and a Cultural Studies PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. As an educator, Hufschmid has taught as a Visiting Artist and a sessional faculty at Emily Carr in Vancouver, BC, as a Guest Professor for ‘Artistic Transformation Processes’ at the Berlin University of the Arts, and most recently worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Film and Media Department at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Currently applying Aesthetic Transformation strategies to investigate settler narratives of colonial land enclosure within her research, Elvira is a collaborator in the SSHRC-funded art and science project ‘Leaning Out of Windows – Art & Physics Collaborations through Aesthetic Transformations’ (2016-22) at Emily Carr University, and recently completed a Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre where she facilitated a series of interdisciplinary workshops and conversations between artists and physicists, titled 'Understanding the World through Aesthetics.'

Beyond her research, Elvira has an extensive place-based conceptual drawing practice that emerges from a deeply felt (inter)-relationship with the living earth and a sensory approach of communicating with the other-than-human world.

Lisa Hirmer's podcast interview is now live! 

Lisa Hirmer is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist who has a Masters of Architecture from the University of Waterloo and has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Culture and Animals Foundation. Currently based in Canada, Hirmer works across a wide range of visual media including photography, performance and text-based art works that often lead to public art works and community collaboration. Informed by a mixed Mexican- and European-newcomer Canadian background, Hirmer is interested in human relationships with the more-than-human world, with much of her recent work examining with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency and the threat of a planetary collapse.
 

     Since 2019, Hirmer is a residency artist with Towards Braiding, a program led by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti working towards decolonial processes and sensibilities. Also a writer, Lisa's book of poetry, Forests Not Yet Here, was published in 2020 by Publication Studio Guelph. Hirmer has also created an extensive body of work under the DodoLab pseudonym from 2009 - 2017.

Interview now live on the UN/Making Network Youtube Channel. 

 

Anong Migwans Beam is mixed media painter, mother, paint-maker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island whose artistic work is influenced by her sense of place with many of her paintings inspired by the natural landscape and the relationship between water and memory.  Having gained much foundational knowledge from her award-winning artist parents, Beam has been actively involved in her local community. One of the founders of Gimaa Radio Communications, an English and Ojibwe language radio station in M'Chigeeng First Nation, Beam also served as the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation's Executive Director where she became an outspoken advocate for the preservation of Indigenous archaeology and Indigenous ceramics, and drew attention to the systems and institutions that uphold physical and monetary inequities that undermine the survival of Indigenous cultures and the education and traditions of their communities. With many of her earliest memories being encounters with colour and learning to know them as forces and personas with emotions and powers, Anong launched her own line of watercolour and oil paints known as BEAM Paints in 2017. 

Interview now live on Spotify! 

Notorious for her courageous and stinky research into fatbergs, Kirsty Robertson is now a full Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at Western University, Canada (London, Ontario), located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Neutral (Chonnonton) peoples. Widely educated and published in areas of craftivism, textiles, and especially petroltextiles that disintegrate into plastic microfibers, her interdisciplinary research focuses on museums, visual culture, contemporary art, environment, and activism across several disciplines and projects.

Also the founding director of the Centre for Sustainable Curating located in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, the Centre supports research, exhibitions, visual/digital production, and pedagogy focused on environmental and social justice, undertakes collaborations with individuals and institutions to develop exhibitions and artworks with low carbon footprints, and develops co-learning environments in which undergraduate and graduate students create art and exhibitions with environmental awareness

Claire Bartleman is an Ontario based artist and educator who holds an MFA in studio art and an MA in art history and curatorial studies from Western University. Bartleman’s textile and sculptural-based practice focuses on sentimentality and the personal objects that we hold onto regardless of their practical utility. Embracing the history of the altered readymade, Bartleman has previously worked with unfinished and abandoned craft projects and is currently creating soft sculptures from worn wedding dresses. A sessional instructor at OCAD University, Bartleman has also worked as an educator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and with Workman Arts. Her lived experience with mental health contextualizes her commitment to decolonization, equity, and access in education. Bartleman has been shown in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and London, Ontario, with exhibitions at XPACE, MKG 127, and Truck Contemporary; she is also the owner and operator of Lilliput Gallery, a tiny exhibition space in an Anne of Green Gables replica dollhouse.

 

To listen to the interview, visit the UN/Making Network Youtube Channel. 

Amy Oliver is a UK based self-taught conceptual artist who draws from her own experiences of women’s rights and identity, domestic and sexual violence, mental health disorder and invisible illness. From Oliver’s feminist perspective, she intentionally works to keep issues considered stigma visible by creating subtle, relatable artworks that allude to her fundamental core strength, yet also express vulnerability and instability so as to portray both the fragile and durable elements of her existence.

 

Having exhibited throughout the UK, Europe, Japan and USA, and in June-July 2019 she had her first solo show, Still Life, at The Jam Factory, Oxford. In October 2018, Oliver co-curated (In)visible at Espacio Gallery, London, a group exhibition which coincided with World Mental Health Day and brought together 43 international, emerging and accomplished artists.

 

Also the founder and curator of The House of Smalls, a gallery space created within a dollhouse,  Oliver established this project November 2020 in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, out of her frustration by the formulaic construct and high costs to submit or  show work to the innumerable amount of virtual galleries that sprang up during the worldwide lockdowns.  Feeling compelled to somehow create an alternative, physical, predominantly women-centric, interactive and affordable not-for-profit art space for connection in isolating times.

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To read the interview, visit the UN/Making Network Blog. 

Meera Sethi, is a contemporary Canadian visual artist who lives and works as an immigrant-settler in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada), the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit River. Exhibiting nationally and internationally, Sethi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection and has earned her multiple awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Councils, the Textile Museum of Canada, University of Toronto, Inter Access, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

With an interdisciplinary, intuitive, and research-based practice, Sethi moves between mediums to ask critical questions about migration, memory, cloth, and care and works at the intersection of the subjugated body and histories of cloth with a particular focus on South Asia and it’s diasporas.   Sethi shares, “I am interested in the making, wearing, and disposing of cloth; the uses of clothing as a form of self-expression and resistance; and the ways textiles are constituted over vast geographies formed through empire, racial capitalism, caste, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism.

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To read the interview, visit the UN/making Network Blog.

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Michelle Wilson is an artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. Successfully defending her SSHRC and OGS funded Ph.D. in May 2022 at the Western University, as a feminist of settler descent studying in colonial institutions, Wilson’s dissertation investigated and confronted the Euro-American archive and how the bodies of other animals are used to convey colonial knowledge systems, with their stories of survival used to perpetuate myths of "settler saviours."

A contributing editor with Embassy Cultural House and a lead researcher for GardenShip and State and the Centre for Sustainable Curating at UWO whose exhibition highlights include Museum London, the McIntosh Gallery (London), Goldsmiths University (London, UK), the Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (Winnipeg), and the City of Ottawa Art Gallery, Michelle’s ongoing projects include leading the Coves Collective, a group of art activist engaged in actions on the Land that challenge ideas of ownership and conservation, that is spearheading the ReMediating Soils Project; an interdisciplinary working group creatively responding to the idea of soil as a relational medium.  

 

To listen to the interview, visit the UN/Making Network Youtube Channel. 

Nava Messas-Waxman is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages identity, memory, liminality, and notions of the body as an archive. Currently living in Toronto and a creative research fellow at the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, Messas-Waxman is now commencing a Ph.D. in the Visual Arts department of York University. Awarded the Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), some of Nava’s recent projects also include “Shared-View" commissioned by  ArtworxTO,  "Variations on Broken Lines" (Gales Gallery, York University, 2020) and "Choreographed Marks" (The Varley Art Gallery of Markham, 2019).
 

Being born into a Moroccan, Judeo-Amazigh immigrant family has shaped her interest in themes of movement, migration, time, and space. Interested in choreographic and archival methods, Nava maintains an ongoing investigation into gestures and her practice-based research has focused on notions of liminality, the psychological process of transitioning across boundaries and borders, and it how it influences the construction of identity and in turn the one’s creative practice and performance archive. 

 

To listen to the interview, visit the UN/Making Network Youtube Channel. 

Exhibiting and speaking internationally, Rachel Epp Buller is a feminist art historian printmaker book artist professor and mother of three who holds a PhD in art history and an MFA in creative practice. Much of her artistic, written, and curatorial work has addressed the maternal body and feminist care in contemporary art contexts. Her current writing and artistic research explore slow practices, such as walking and stitching, with a particular focus on letter-writing as an act of relational care and a radical intervention into practices of academic scholarship.

 

Also a published writer, she privileges collaboration across disciplines and geographies, including her edited books Reconciling Art and Mothering (Ashgate / Routledge), Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity (Demeter), and curatorial projects at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita Art Museum, Kauffman Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and Das Verborgene Museum, Epp Buller is also a two-time Fulbright US Scholar (2010-11 to Germany and 2021-22 to Canada), regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project, a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for Art, and Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US).

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To read her interview, visit the UN/making Network Blog. 

Twyla Exner is a Canadian artist who currently resides as a visitor on the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc territory, situated within the unceded ancestral lands of the Secwépemc Nation. Inspired by the wonders of nature and electronic equipment gone awry, Exner, both fascinated and repelled by technology and its increasingly invasive role in our daily lives, uses the materials and imagery of discarded electronics to arrive at wondrous and worrisome installations, sculptures and drawings that propose hybrids of technological structures and living organisms.

Holding a BFA from the University of Regina (Regina, SK) and a MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC), Twyla has also held artist residencies with Herschel Supply Co. Gastown in  Vancouver, BC and  the Omineca Arts Center in Prince George, BC and been involved in many collaborative projects with other public institutions. To share her expertise, Twyla has also held multiple teaching positions and has been exhibited in Canada and the USA.  Currently held in numerous public collections including the Royal BC Museum (Victoria, BC), Saskatchewan Arts (Regina, SK) and the Kamloops Art Gallery (Kamloops, BC), Exner’s most recent news is she has been hired on as an Assistant Professor at the Thompson Rivers University in the Department of Communications and Visual Arts in Kamloops, BC. 

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To read her interview, visit the UN/making Network Blog.

 

An award winning artist and published author, Sharon Kallis graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1996 after which she began working with materials from the land and has come to pride herself on what she calls a “one mile diet” approach to sourcing art materials, by discovering the inherent material potential in a local landscape. Also highly involved with her immediate communities, Kallis utilizes traditional hand techniques to transform invasive plant species and garden waste into site-specific installations that become ecological interventions.  To date she has exhibited and engaged with communities in Ireland, Spain, Mexico and throughout the United States. At home in Vancouver, Sharon works regularly with Vancouver Park Board, Stanley Park Ecology Society, Community Arts Council of Vancouver and the Environmental Youth Alliance and is the founding executive director of EartHand Gleaners Society, an arts-based organization that brings together artists, scientists and educators to rethink uses for green-waste and invasive plants. 

A member of MOPARRC, an artist collective that maintains the Means of Production Garden, a community garden that grows art materials, some of Sharon’s recent projects include leading The Urban Weaver Project, which works with weavers from different First Nations, other fibre artists, park ecologists and the local community to research how the invasive species of Stanley Park can be used as replacements for traditional weaving materials not sustainably harvestable in the city.

 

To listen to the interview, visit the UN/Making Network Youtube Channel.