ALL GALLERIES
SECHELT ARTS FESTIVAL

November 15 – December 14, 2024

Our Salish Sea
Sosan Blaney, Mieke Bray, M. Simon Levin, Claudia Medina, Laura Piersol, Nadina Tandy, Kamala Todd, Clare Wilkening and others

Opening Reception: Friday November 15th at 5pm
Closing Party: Saturday December 14th at 7pm (visuals by Mieke Bray)

As a closing of the 2024 Sechelt Arts Festival, this exhibition brings together works by artists living on the Sunshine Coast that shares their stories of (and with) the Salish Sea. The festival, through art, seeks to weave together environmental, cultural and social ideas as a means of inspiring our communities. Art has the ability to help us think through difficult ideas through play, joy, community and belonging. It is in dance, theatre and music that we are able to move through and with ideas; it is through the language of visual art that we are able to give form; and it is through words and texts that we shape sometimes incomprehensible ideas. And for many, the climate and our changing natural environment is one of those.

Claudia Medina’s Clam Basket is a reflection on the interconnection between the ecology of the Salish Sea, the challenge of reviving Tla’Amin cultural and artistic traditions through the ongoing impacts of colonization, and the ever-increasing realities of climate/eco crises. Sosan Blaney, member of the Tla’amin Nation, artist, and keeper of cultural practices, prepares material and weaves a clam basket on her territory that has existed from time immemorial in the lands and waters we now call the Salish Sea.

Clare Wilkening utilizes ceramic forms to evoke, narrate, and to respond to specific places and ecological issues. In their work, they wish to challenge the gesture of sustainability beyond its current cultural logic, and to shift environmental thinking from the language of sustainability and efficiency towards engagement in reciprocal and regenerative care. Mussel Formations is a work that makes reference to the record-breaking heatwave in summer of 2021, when millions of shoreline creatures cooked in their shells and died. Months later, there were mounds of empty shells on the beach. Clare gathered a few hundred mussel shells and made sprig molds of them. Now they cast these molds in clay to make individual mussels for use as components in constructing these ceramic mussel formations.

Other works include: Kamala Todd’s water rock kin, a digital meditation on the waters of the estuary at Chapman Creek, and the rocks that call to her through their tactility, their resilience and the stories they carry. Nadina Tandy and Laura Piersol will share process-based work, thinking through water, waterways, water movements, working with materials and inks harvested along these shorelines. M. Simon Levin gives visual form to the watershed and tributaries that flow into Davis Bay, connecting our understanding of the relationships between the top of the mountains and the Salish Sea.