Published in Visual Arts News
On a Friday evening in late May 2021, I sat on the couch of my student housing living room in Corner Brook editing nude photos of myself taken by photographer, Sheilagh O’Leary. She sat at a small table only a few yards away, laughing and taking photos of the other three women present: Sydney Lancaster, who was handing out glasses of wine, Erienne Rennick who was introducing her nervous dog to the space and Kellyann Henderson, our evening’s chef, deftly showing off her pizza throwing skills in our small shared kitchenette. These four women and myself are the second group of students to participate in Memorial University’s new low-residency MFA program and this evening was just one of four weeks’ worth of remarkable nights that we shared during the program’s on-site intensive.
Fashioned in a way that blends distance-learning with the concept of an artist residency, this program drew me to apply in 2019 because of its structure. As with any low-residency or online program, students are encouraged to come as their full and complicated selves. Low-residency programs offer the space and understanding of divided attention, while the on-site intensive promised the heightened period of focus and productivity typical of artist residencies or retreats.
We had all been in touch with one another starting in early 2020, emailing from different provinces and Googling each other's names eagerly awaiting the coming spring to meet one another and begin our lives as graduate students, but after a series of WebEX meetings and a salvo of emails, we received the announcement that our program has been deferred due to COVID-19. After 13 months of anticipation and a grueling 14-day isolation in a beige dorm room, we finally met as a cohort.
The first day of our in-person meeting, filled with hugs and communion, set the tone for relationships founded in collaboration, generosity and support. Amidst a busy schedule of technical demos, excursions and meet-and-greets, our time in our studios was couched between the informal gathering of shared meals. It was over one of these meals that we first talked about the ideal of resilience; sharing stories of trauma and strength, O’Leary loudly proclaimed “fuck resilience! I’m tired of being so resilient all the time!” That statement became her response any time the idea of resiliency came up and has since kept a question in my mind: why do we focus so much on this idea of being able to survive and thrive in spite of rather than because of?
Frankly, it can be extremely patronizing and problematic to congratulate another person on their resilience, particularly for those who face systemic oppressions. The proud badge of resilience is one that should be claimed, not handed out as a consolation prize from oppressors to their oppressed. While resilience can be a beautiful thing in its defiance, no one should have to be defined by their trauma alone.
While there is an element of resilience in each of our practices, I want to speak to the joy that not only fed our time in-residence, but plays a critical role in each of these artist’s work. I want to echo O’Leary: Fuck resilience, give me joy.
Henderson’s paintings, books, zines and installations focus on maximalism. Her work is rich with colour and deeply storied, self-portraits and of her family are emotive and almost indulgent. Henderson invokes cycling culture, queer identity and her upbringing in South Florida to talk about white American poverty and resourcefulness, but the stories that she tells are distinctly absent of any kind of “rise above” narrative. Henderson paints tableaus to celebrate and define White Trash culture and aesthetics, and invites viewers to come and play in her rich and colourful worlds.
Rennick’s work is equally as playful and colourful, but she looks towards play and glee as a means of healing. Drawing from her own identity as a neurodivergent artist, Rennick’s painting practice began as a means of self-soothing. The visual optics of her intricate paintings have given way to kinetic sculptures that play with optical illusions as a means of resetting the mind. Her upcoming project at CB Nuit, Corner Brook’s Art at Night festival, is a series of glowing plexiglass sculptures that reference playground carousels, inviting childlike interactivity.
For Lancaster and O’Leary, the idea of joy is just as important, but takes on the form of peace rather than exuberance. O’Leary connects to the land and to water as a way of finding joy and homecoming. She draws on her Mi’kmaq identity and work as a community leader to bring people together on the land to give back and care for it. While human connection plays an important role in her past works, O’Leary began moving towards self-portraiture during the intensive, and is now looking towards a series that situates her own body in water, the place where she finds the greatest sense of personal connection. O’Leary’s work is about grounding, deep and slow joy.
Similarly, Lancaster also looks to the land and her connection to it in her practice. Coming from the prairies of Alberta, she has been passionately researching her family’s history and the Dominion Land Survey to navigate the difficult questions of agency and accountability from the settler position. As she described during one of our dinner chats, underneath all of these heady ideas and the imperfect territory of navigating one’s social responsibility as a settler is the concept of love. “Deeply, deeply loving the land.” In her work, entitled Make=Believe, Lancaster gently bends an overgrown Caragana grove to create a world for play, exploration and rest, delightful and complicated by the plant’s own beauty and tenacity as an invasive species.
In the time that has passed since we all left Corner Brook, the five of us have kept in touch through group chats and regular video calls which has given us time to collectively reflect on what it meant to us to be creating in such a tight little community during what we hope is the final chapter of a global pandemic. In a small city of Newfoundland, working out of an almost empty university campus, we were protected, cared for and supported - and we all worked hard to care for one another. The nourishment that we took from our intensive had nothing to do with creating in spite of, we found prolific energy and creativity because we had the space to allow our minds and our bodies to explore. We had the privilege of ease.