Banff Art Centre - March 26

We spent time yesterday putting up this poster to advertise our next exhibition, which begins tomorrow. We will hang in the morning and attend the opening in the afternoon. Family & friends are coming from Calgary for the event.

We have been handing out small invitations, with this image on it, to everyone we know around the campus.

Must go. I am spending the day in the dye studio.

Banff March 18

Last Sunday I took the afternoon off and went cross country skiing with Ron. The fresh air and vigorous exercise was mind clearing.
Today we are continuing our sessions with Martha Cole. This morning we learnt some strategies for coping with negative criticism of our work - great tools to have when putting your work out there.

Gloria is working on a large hand embroidered work. She is covering great expanses with french knots. One afternoon Ingrid offered to help out and make knots for her.

Donna planning her work.

Banff March 10

On Sunday I took the day off. Ron came up to Banff and we planned to go cross country skiing but it was cold and a bitter wind made it feel very cold. I hadn't packed my really cold weather gear. So we settled for a walk along the river.

The scenery was looking beautiful until I couldn't feel my thumb. We turned around and went back to the car. The Penhold Trail will have to wait until things warm up.

The beavers are still busy. We went back to the Banff Centre and had hot drinks in the Kiln coffee shop to warm up.
At 6:00 we all met in the Other Gallery and took our work off the walls. We had called the exhibition No More White Walls so we returned the white walls.

Here is Donna plastering the holes we made. The next day another exhibition started moving in.
We will be back at the end of the month, Friday 27th, with an Open House (wine and food supplied by the Leighton Centre), with the exhibit continuing over the weekend.

Banff Art Centre - March 6

Yesterday we spent most of the day in the dye and print studios. After Ingrid's demo on making a deconstructed screen with thickened dyes, I made one and left it overnight to cure. The next day I printed through it onto a length of soda ash soaked cloth. This is the first layer of colour with the 2nd colour, blue, ready to be pushed through.

This morning I rinsed it after it had cured overnight.

...and hung it to dry. I won't be able to see the complexity of the layering and colour mixing until it is dried and ironed. The stringy stuff in front is cheese cloth. I was wanting analogous warm and cool but the warm is too much like salmon so I will be over-dyeing it.

Leighton Artists Colony

Here is a view from our studio looking out towards the neighbouring one which is designed for an artist working with sound.

Here we are last March, all bundled up in our winter gear, heading to our studio for a mornings work.

Click on the title of this post to find out more information about this wonderful programme the Banff Centre offers artists. We will be doing an Independent Residency in The Gerin-Lajoie Studio which is a space specially designed for visual artists. The light coming into the studio is perfect.

At the same time we have many services and facilities available to us at the Banff Centre, including a large arts-focused library/archives, exhibition space and printing/media departments. All of our personal needs are taken care of with private, serviced, hotel-like rooms, meals in a spectacular eagle-nest type restaurant, full fitness centre and ozone drenched mountain air everywhere.

Imagine having all of your personal needs & physical requirements being taken care, being surrounded by mountains & trees, & being continually supported by colleagues who speak the same language - for a whole month!

With these conditions, I predict some amazing work is going to be produced by Articulation.

Banff Centre , Leighton Studios

Exciting news! Articulation, the fibre arts group I belong to, has been accepted into the Artist in Residence program in the Leighton Studios for the whole month of March next year, 2009.
Last March we spent 2 weeks in our studio in the trees carrying out research for our 'Women Rock' study. We are all now back in our studios across Canada developing our ideas, sampling & gathering materials. Come March we will return to our goup studio in the mountains to make the body of work. We already have bookings to exhibit our 'Women Rock' work which will complete the last phase of this large group project.

Banff Centre Residency

Here we are, 7 of 10 members of Articulation, in our residency at the Banff Centre.

Our studio in the woods.

A hike up a frozen river with Dr Paul Mackay, a structural geologist, who spent the day with us, explaining how the Rockies were formed. He was most inspiring and I started to develop a piece the next day.