I’m delighted to be part of EBA’s 32nd Annual Open Studio. In addition to exhibitions on the two floors of the studio and artists’ open studios, there are artists’ talks and tours.
I’m delighted that my painting Mother Tree has been purchased for the National Capital Commission Official Residences collection.
Mother Tree, 2022 copper leaf, oil on wood panel, 46 x 46 cm
From July 22 to July 31, 2024, I participated in an art residency with Ottawa artist Kathy Bergquist. We were on Halls Island in Haliburton, Ontario. https://www.hallsisland.ca
It was a very inspiring and productive residency. I worked on small scale work in a sketch book and on paper with pencil and gouache, researching, observing and preparing for future work.
The photo shows the beautiful Lake Koshlong.: the island on the left is Halls Island and on the right is a treed island with no cabins.
Kathy and I were the only two on the island. There are several cabins on the island, including a main cabin, two sleeping cabins, and a sauna cabin. The island is privately owned by a family who generously provide island access to artists.
My research at the residency was considering the ecosystem of the island and the interdependency between different organisms. This photo shows a Bleeding Teeth Fungus Mushroom, one of the organisms I saw on the island. It has a symbiotic relationship with vascular plants.
I was also intrigued by lichens I saw on the island; lichens are a symbiotic association between algae and fungus.
We also saw this iron bacteria on the water. (The pine tree at bottom of photo is a reflection.) "Iron-oxidizing bacteria are found in iron rich waters and get the energy they need to live and reproduce from oxidizing dissolved iron." https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-water/water/water-quality/algae-watch/recognize-algae/other-aquatic-phenomena
Amazing!
In June 2024, I was delighted to participate in the Open House exhibition Susan Shantz organized at Gushul Studio in the town of Blairmore in Crowsnest Pass Alberta.
VERTICES: GUSHUL STUDIO Residency and Open House | June 28, 2024
Organized by Susan Shantz, Artist in Residence June 10 – 30, 2024)
Participating Artists
Terry Billings, Saskatoon, SK
Dagmar Dahle, Lethbridge, AB
Don Gill, Lethbridge, AB
Sandra Gregson, Ottawa, ON
Mary Kavanagh, Lethbridge, AB
Annie Martin, Lethbridge, ON
Lezli Rubin-Kunda,Tel Aviv, IL
Susan Shantz, Saskatoon, SK
Kara Uzelman, Nokomis, SK
Nick Wade, Lethbridge, AB
I exhibited recent work: Far, Near 2024, a painting/sculptural work and two paintings on alumnium, from Pyrocumulus series (1) and (2) .
Far, near 2024 Media: Oil on wood panels, cut map of Canada, tracing paper, inks made from plant materials Dimensions: 42 x 30 x 4 cm
from Pyrocumulus series (1), 2024 oil on aluminum, 30 x 30 cm
from Pyrocumulus series (2), 2024 oil on aluminum, 30 x 30 cm
For the past several months, myself and several other artists from my studio (Enriched Bread Artists) have been working on a collaborative exhibition with artists from South Korea. Our exhibition, Atmosphere: Environment, Emotion, Exchange, opened last week at Trinity Gallery in Ottawa.
I included two paintings from my Pyrocumulus series in the exhibition; one of the paintings is shown below.
from Pyrocumulus series, 2024, oil on aluminum, 30 x 30 cm
The exhibition continues until August 6, 2024.
I’m delighted to have my drawings included as an art project in the current issue of drain magazine. Drain is an on-line magazine and this issue is edited by Celina Jeffery, art historian and professor at University of Ottawa.
Announcing: THE GARDEN - Vol. 19:2, Jan. 2024
Icon image - Jinny Yu, Ki Jun Kim, and Frédéric Pitre, S’Y RETROUVER,
24th International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis, Québec, 2023.
Photo by Martin Bond.
Derek Jarman (1942-1994) – the English filmmaker, AIDS activist, and gardener, created his coastal garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent, UK towards the end of his life. Jarman’s embodied explorations of gardening as an essential component of health and well-being, of living in the now while planting for an unknown future, speaks of a quiet resistance, one which characterizes the contents of this issue.
The language of gardening – time and possibility, are present throughout this issue which concerns gardening as a creative act. In every contribution by artists, writers, and poets, there is a distinct permeability and rupture between art as gardening and gardening as art. The physical characteristics of the garden are embedded in the arts, and the artist-gardener is embodied in the lead essay by Gabriel Sacco, who thinks through Jarman’s queer ecological legacies in his own creative gardening and photographic practice. Mehdi Sharafi’s essay on Anselm Kiefer engages with the artist garden as a kind of studio practice, bringing to bear a kind of porosity between art, gardening, and memory – both individual and collective.
The garden as a human endorsement is a central concept in this issue, one which is unpacked as: resistance in contributions by Ash Barbu, Zainab Hussain, and Anna Paluch; immersive process and inter-species dialogue by Carolyn Lambert, Sandra Gregson, Elizabeth L. Pence, and Anna Reckin; and, even ambivalence as in Yu, Kim and Pitre’s white clover maze.
The garden in artistic terms, brings nature to the city, to create community connections and chance encounters as in Mikayla Journée’s essay. Here as in the work of the Collectives, and others, the garden as a site of marginalized memory also proliferates, requiring readers to recognize the colonial contexts of the garden in the wake of Indigenous liberty in which notions of trespass and privilege are ever present. The garden as a creative site of practice, explored through place, material connections and displacement are further explored by Deborah Margo, Desiree Valadares, Zainab Hussain, and Saanya Chopra. Throughout, gardens feature as witnesses to threads of creativity, ancestral knowledge or disruption, queer entanglements, and all threaded through the pressures of climate change and biodiversity loss.
This issue of Drain acts as a kind of assemblage of ideas associated with art as gardening and gardening as a creative act. Can we co-world, and rethink our entangled co-existence to the environment through the garden? This preposition underscores the concept of this issue, wherein the garden figures as a kind of disruption of ‘domestic’ nature, troubling the gap between deep time and present, and requiring of us the need to declassify what we fear – a future without ourselves. Here, we shift the metaphor of the garden as beauty to the garden as an uncanny space and ask: will humans co-make ‘modern nature’ to save it?
This issue was edited by Celina Jeffery
My studio collective, Enriched Bread Artists, is having it's 31st annual Open Studio; for me it’s the second! The opening is Thursday October 19 from 6 to 9 and the show continues from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday October 21, Sunday October 22, Saturday October 28 and Sunday October 29, 2023
For many years, Enriched Bread Artists, where my studio is located, has been a Doors Open location in Ottawa. The studio is located on the first and second floors of a building which was a commercial bakery. Built in 1924, it was designed by Sydney Comber and “is a valuable example of an early 20th century industrial building”.
As part of the event, we hung an exhibition in the common areas of our space. I exhibited two artworks which were made by sewing shredded paper. (Doors Open is a yearly event in Ottawa and was held June 3rd and 4th in 2023.)
Receipts (from one year), 2011, shredded receipts, thread, diameter 160 cm.
Words, 2011, shredded dictionary, thread, approximately 4 metres x 0.5 metres
This sculpture was previously exhibited on the floor (Shred, Loop Gallery, 2011). Exhibited on the wall, it retains the feel of a stream or river.
I’m delighted to be part of the CPAWS fundraiser, Journey Through the Dumoine River. During the summer of 2022, I participated in CPAWS Art Retreat. It was located in the Dumoine River watershed area; the Dumoine River is one of the last ‘wild’ rivers in southern Ontario. https://cpaws-ov-vo.org
I have donated two paintings to CPAWS.
I am a Tree, 2022 oil on wood panel, 23 x 30 cm
The impetus for the painting, I am a Tree, came from imagining I was one of the trees rising up from Lac Penniseault where we camped during the CPAWS DRAW Art Retreat. I wanted to feel all that the trees were: the rich humus at my roots, the rise of the sun, the surround of air and brush of wind. I also thought of the author Richard Powers’ assertion in his novel, The Overstory, that trees and humans share a common ancestor, as well, a quarter of their genes.
I am a Tree (2), 2022 oil on wood panel, 25 x 30 cm
Similar to my painting, I am a Tree, the impetus came from imagining I was one of the trees rising up from Lac Penniseault. Although we were off the grid whilst at the CPAWS Art Retreat, we relied on a generator to power up our phones (which we were using primarily to take photographs). I am a Tree (2) considers the ecosystem of a tree in relation to humans: one that may include a tree being used as a support for hydro wires.
I’m excited that my series of paintings, Being Tree, will be shown at Sivarultasa Gallery in Almonte, Ontario from March 24 to May 5, 2023. The opening event is Saturday April 1 from 2 to 5 p.m. Sivarulrasa Gallery
I’m delighted to have my installation, Cairn (1907) included in Dying.exhibit at Artscape Youngplace in Toronto. The exhibition runs from January 14 to January 31, 2023.
I did a very small version of this installation whilst in Iceland at a residency at SIM in 2018 and subsequently a larger version in my front room gallery space at my home in Toronto; it was wonderful to have the installation included in this exhibition at Artscape Youngplace.
Cairn (1907) ©Sandra Gregson 2023
Cairns, human made stacks of stones, have been constructed since pre-history as markers for burial. Cairn (1907) is a stack of collected stones; each stone has been wrapped with discarded plastic. Stones, formed over millions of years from minerals that compose the earth, convey an immense sense of time. Synthetic plastic, which is manufactured from minerals extracted from the earth, was first made in 1907. It is often used once and discarded.
Plastic infiltrates molecules and organisms to disrupt what took millions of years to evolve causing long-lasting environmental damage and death to many birds, fish, and animals. Wrapping and binding are part of ritual and symbolic acts linked to death.
This installation includes a viewer participation component; plastic and additional stones are alongside the installation and viewers are invited to select and wrap a stone to add to the cairn.
detail, Cairn (1907) ©Sandra Gregson 2023
My studio, Enriched Bread Artists (EBA) is celebrating its 30th anniversary Open Studio. EBA is located at 951 Gladstone Avenue, Ottawa.
The Enriched Bread Studio’s Open Studio is coming up once again! We’re celebrating 30 years of EBA and you’re invited.
Vernissage
Thursday, October 20, 2022, 6 to 9 pm.
Open Studio continues over two weekends.
First weekend:
Saturday, October 22, 11 am – 5 pm;
Sunday, October 23, 11 am – 5 pm.
Second weekend:
Saturday, October 29, 11 am – 5 pm;
Sunday, October 30, 11 am – 5 pm.
Participating Artists
Sarah Anderson ● Heidi Conrod ● Maren Kathleen Elliott ● Sandra Gregson ● Sayward Johnson ● Gayle Kells ● Patricia Kenny ● Clara Kim ● Karina Kraenzle ● Juliana McDonald ● Jenny McMaster ● Valerie P. Noftle ● Christos Pantieras ● Bozica Radjenovic ● Colette Gréco-Riddle ● Daniel Sharp ● Cindy Stelmackowich ● Svetlana Swinimer ● Tavi Weisz ● Joyce Westrop ● Yvonne Wiegers
https://www.enrichedbreadartists.com/open-studio-current/
At the end of July, I (with 14 other artists) participated in CPAWS DRAW, an annual art residency “in support of the ongoing protection of the Dumoine River”. CPAWS is Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, a charity dedicated to the protection of public land, freshwater and ocean; DRAW is the acronym for Dumoine River Art for Wilderness; the art retreat is organized by the Ottawa Valley Chapter of CPAWS.
We camped at Lac Pennisault at the ZEC Rapide-des-Joachims in Quebec which is about two and a half hours north of Ottawa. It was an inspiring week of exploring, noticing, and learning. CPAWS-OV has been working with others “to identify and create ecological corridors on both sides of the Ottawa River”. During the week, I worked on sketches and developed ideas that I plan to develop in the studio. Each artist will be donating a work for a CPAWS-OV fundraising exhibition in 2023.
Very excited to have moved into a studio at Enriched Bread Artists, Ottawa.
I moved to Ottawa in 2021, and now May 2022, am finally re-starting my blog. I live near the Ottawa and Rideau rivers. My studio is currently on Loretta Avenue North; July 1st, I move to a studio at Enriched Bread Artists. The studio is across the river and across the canal from where I live, about an hour and half walk or about an 30 minute bike ride or 40 minute transit ride.
I arrived 2 days ago for a two-month residency at SIM (The Association of Icelandic Artists) in Reykjavik and started work by walking, observing colour, light, and texture while I formulate my ideas. It is beautiful! and something about the air and sky makes it seem easier to see further and clearer.
thaw, freeze, stillness, wind, quiet
blues, whites, silvers, ochres, yellows
I recently viewed the film Solaris by Tarkovsky (from 1972). A view of the ocean from above figures reoccurs in the film; the ocean is a character which tampers with the memories and consciousness of the humans in the film. Below are two images from the film: the first of the ocean and the second, the final image of the ocean in which an island appears. Very potent images.
Started collecting images for new work by taking some photos in the garden. Always amazing how scale and isolating details makes things appear differently. Pleasurable process of noticing and gathering images to initiate new work.
