Artist Bios
Exhibition in Ground Floor Window Gallery (132 Fort York Blvd, Toronto) from June 12th - July 9th, 2021.
Arlette Ngung
(Toronto)
Arlette Ngung is a textile artist and pattern maker, inspired by tradition and sustainability. Her holds a degree in Fashion Design/Pattern-making from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and a Certificate in CAD from Formamod, Paris, France. After a successful experience in New York, Arlette moved to Paris, where she worked as a billingual technical designer and created displays for well-known brands: Saks Fifth Ave, Victoria’s Secrets and Bloomingdales. That’s where she developed a keen eye for and interest in the merging worlds of fashion and textile art. Arlette focuses on the preservation and reinterpretation of traditional African textiles. She has been profiled with CBC Radio Canada and Selvedge Magazine UK for her vegan approach to art.
Betty Carpick
(Thunder Bay)
Betty Carpick is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work looks at social, cultural, and environmental issues in serious and playful ways by creating art that exists in the space between process and performance as well as the missing portions between the real and the imagined. She engages in creativity with community members of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds, exploring metaphors that speak to the fragility, strengths, and transitory state of our lives and surroundings. Betty's practice includes ink making, textile arts, writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, and installation, often blurring the boundaries of these disciplines. Betty is Cree and European from Northern Manitoba.
Binaeshee-Quae Couchie Nabigon
(Biigtigong First Nation)
Binaeshee-Quae (Loon Clan) is a singer, story/song writer, actor & community arts enthusiast from Biigtigong First Nation. Exploring multiple ways of expression and connection helps to pump their heart. Binaeshee-Quae’s music is often described as haunting; the sound swaying between root and bud with onomatopoeically crafted lyrics. Passionate about community arts; Binaeshee-Quae has been involved as an artist, presenter, mentor, workshop facilitator and volunteer since 2009, where she assists and leads in music, theatre, movement and visual arts activities. Binaeshee-Quae is brown as a berry, free as a bird.
Dawn Allard
(Echo Bay/Algoma)
Dawn Allard is a self-taught artist living and working on the North Shore of Lake Huron in the Algoma District. She embarked on her creative fibre journey seven years ago. Her felting style is constantly evolving, and she loves taking classes (recently in hand embroidery and bead work) to enhance her practice. Working in natural fibres from her own flock, Dawn transforms these raw materials into sculptures, paintings and textiles, drawing inspiration from the landscapes and coastlines that she explores on foot and from her kayak. Along with exhibiting and travelling to shows in her region, Dawn facilitates needle felting and wet felting workshops, sharing with others her passion for this wonderful art form.
Julia Tribe
(Thunder Bay)
Julia Tribe is a seasoned artist with over 30-year experience designing sets and costumes for theatre, opera and dance. Her innovative designs received recognition in major companies across Canada and internationally. More recently, she has broadened her collaborative practice: becoming a certified expressive arts therapist and community arts facilitator, who uses multimodal exchange as a tool of wellness and vision. Julia believes passionately that the arts can facilitate personal & social change, and that art-making is shape-able to explore difficult conversations in unexpected ways. Julia works with all ages and capacities, honouring diverse voices and unique stories, while nurturing the inter-connectivity and collaborative exchange. www.exatcollective.com
Kitsuné Soleil
(Welland)
Kitsuné Soleil is the daughter of a residential school survivor. Her blood comes from Mistawasis First Nation. She is a Plains Cree (Nehiyaw, Bear Clan) multi-disciplinary artist residing on Treaty 3 territory. As an imaginative soul, she likes to express herself through fashion, storytelling and her online socials, bringing light to Indigenous issues. Kitsuné is passionate about writing because it's exciting to create a universe and develop characters to live in that “made up” space. They are currently working on their first play, and managing ways to display it virtually as a work in progress. They are constantly exploring themes of culture and balancing today’s digital, and continuing to pursue theatre arts through writing and collaborations in safe spaces through these trying times.
Meg Paulin
(North Bay)
Megan Lozicki Paulin is an artist, born and raised in North Bay, Ontario, from Mi'kmaq and Polish descent. Her work incorporates elements of visual art, archival and scientific research, sound, projection, site-specific art and community-based performance. Megan is a core member of Aanmitaagzi Story Makers and has apprenticed under Master Tsimshian Carver Victor Reece and Sharon Jinkerson-Brass' Big Sky Storytelling Society. Megan studied Fine Arts and Indigenous Studies formally and informally and has enjoyed working with youth in communities among the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation, Nipissing First Nation, and Nepal. She is currently completing her Master’s of Environmental Studies at Nipissing University, focusing on themes of harvesting, art making and storytelling techniques and their impacts on cultural identity, continuity and resurgence; resource protection and monitoring; and the transmission of traditional knowledge.
Mireille Gagnon Moes
(St. Joseph Island)
Originally from “la belle province”, Mireille Gagnon has lived in the Algoma area for most of her creative life. Her interest in working with fibres started as she and her husband moved to a rural setting where wool was easily obtained from nearby sheep farmers. Ever curious to learn ways and skills with wool, she soon made contact with a hand spinning guild in Sault Ste Marie who generously showed her the basics of spinning yarn on a borrowed spinning wheel and some clean, carded wool. From 1981 to this day, Mireille’s interests led her to self-teaching of hand weaving, hand dyeing and hand felting, and involvement in a number of Arts & Crafts organisations. She has won many awards, exhibited and sold her work at many events, including the Wabi Sabi Fine Crafts exhibition which she originated on St. Joseph Island in 2000.
Roberta Della-Pica
(Killaloe)
From Lake Clear, Algonquin Territory, Roberta Della-Pica, epitomizes that wise adage, “to serve one’s people, there could be no greater honour”. A warm, sensitive, socially-conscious member of her community, she has dedicated her passion, devotion and commitment to the expressive arts, for health and wellness, and community engagement, (as an artist, workshop and manual designer and co-facilitator). She has shown herself to be a powerful force for positive change, helping to make communities more vibrant, safer and even more wonderful places to live, work and co-exist.
Sarah Gartshore
(Sudbury)
Songwriter: Sarah Gartshore Ajiijak Ndoodem (wiin) is an Anishinaabe and Scottish educator, theatre creator, storyteller. The daughter of Lois Apaquash and Curtis Gartshore Jr, Sarah is a champion of community solidarity and Radical Self Love. Sarah is thrilled to collaborate with Trudy Jones, Kitsune Soleil and her beautiful Jumblies kin.
Singer: Trudy Jones lives in Sault Ste. Marie and is a member of Batchewana First Nation. She is the daughter of Ken and Elizabeth Boyer. Trudy is the mother of two beautiful children and a wife to a talented carpenter. Trudy has loved singing since the age of four and is grateful to collaborate musically with Sarah Gartshore once again.
Singer: Noah Blackburn (he/him) is a songwriter, recording artist and mixing and mastering engineer who lives in Sudbury Ontario. He is proud to work with his Mom on this project.
Sherry Guppy
(North Bay)
Sherry Guppy is a multi-disciplinary artist from Northeastern Ontario. Through large-scale installation, painting, printmaking and textile, her work incorporates traditional and contemporary storytelling. She studied at NSCAD and holds an undergraduate degree in sociology. She has collaborated on professional performance and community-engaged projects and productions with Aanmitaagzi, Spiderwoman Theatre, Jumblies and others
Tuija Hansen
(Thunder Bay)
Tuija Hansen is a textile artist based in Thunder Bay. She learned to felt, dye, weave and embroider at Kootenay School of Arts, and majored in printmaking and social justice studies at Lakehead University. Her practice is influenced by the boreal forest; incorporating organic, found matter into her mixed media and textile works, using foraged plant-dyes, and engaging with her Finnish ancestry.