snapshots from the studio

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The finale to the residency was a fashion show runway experience for their class, where students were able to model their creations and share the ideas behind them.  Garments included dresses, shirts, skirts and jumpsuits as well as capes, bags and hats.   Students were proud of what they had created. 

Throughout the residency Nellie created a safe space to experience the pleasure in dressing up and experimentation with clothing and explore students own relationship to clothing, which is often fraught with identity and social anxiety.  

Echo dyeing and embroidery

The Mending and Tending Project, is an ongoing, collaborative project across the whole school and wider community.  Students and members of the school community were invited to stitch a bandage to represent an expression of care for a hurt in their own lives or in the life of someone else.  

The bandages were also made by students using recycled cotton sheets, mordanted and bundle wrapped with leaves. These were steamed and unwrapped to reveal beautiful trace imprints on the cloth made from the pigment and tannins in the leaves.  The stitches are intuitive and  imbued with deep intention, charting abstract pathways in through and wrapping around the ethereal landscapes - that make visible the longing and love that is present in tending for each other's hurts. 

Drawings, relief prints, landscape painting and poetry  

As many as 1 in 5 wild species in Canada are at risk of extinction with 135 known species already extirpated from our country. Who noticed their disappearance? Do we know their names?  

Remembering that which is loss or endangered, is an expression of love and care;  It is a calling to attention. 

What does it mean to mark the loss of a whole species? How can expressions of art provide a context for that remembering. 

Over the course of 5 weeks, intermediate students in grades 3,4 and 5 spent time getting to know one species in Canada that is either extinct, extirpated or critically endangered, in our waters, on land or in the air. Students became knowledge holders for their given species – many of which are little known.  Using photographs and research information, students created bold reduction relief prints to give visibility to the form and features of their given species.   THe bold, bright, non naturalistic colours, call out for our attention, to hold them in our memory. 

As habitat loss is the primary reason for species endangerment, students each painted a tempera landscape depicting the habitat of their species .  These were collaged together into three long mural strips in the main foyer of the school.  

We held a lament ceremony to honor their lost or endangered species.  Each species was named and remembered through a lament poem, written by each student.  After reading the poem. Students printed a silhouetted absence of their species onto their landscape. By speaking their species’ name in a witnessed act of remembrance, students asserted the intrinsic value of each species as part of our beautiful and fragile world. This was a powerful moment, that held both sorrow and a strong sense of felt connection; we were made aware of the weight of what it means for a whole species to be lost, and a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings.