2025

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Recorder & stewardship liaison

Camila Szefler is an illustrator and mixed media artist with a BFA from Emily Carr. She enjoys documenting the everyday, wherever that might be, in her small hand bound sketchbook with an attraction to drawing landscapes, patterns and plants through the lens of her direct environment and the natural world.

Website: camilaszefler.com

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Editor & website assistance

Lex Battle is a creative storyteller with a diverse visual language that speaks through her artistic endeavors. Alongside having proficient knowledge in film and sound design, her creations engage in an ongoing conversation with nature as it merges her cultural practices.

Website: https://alexisvbattle.wixsite.com/lexbattle

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Stewardship liaison

Nicola Hodges is a young community-engaged artist fascinated with fibre and all the ways we twist and form it into our everyday lives; she explores daily hand making and the possibilities of adornment in the practical everyday as a way to reopen the connection to personal traditions, natural materials and the land.

Website: https://tinyislandtextiles.wixsite.com/nicola

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Working artist board member & instructor

Since my first workshop in 2022, I have been joyfully immersed in the EartHand Gleaners community.  By way of introduction, let me share a reminiscence…

That workshop, From Wood to Wool with Sharon Kallis and Anna Heywood-Jones, included a pre-session invitation to the Means of Production gardens to prune the fruit trees whose bark would release the dyes we would learn to apply to locally sourced wool.  This wool came from a sheep named Creampuff, of the nearby Barnston Island flock tended lovingly by EartHand collaborators Susan and John Russell.  The workshop was held “Trillium Park” according to the city map, but we were welcomed to Skwácháýs, a place that in pre-contact times was lush with salt marshes and underground springs, land that has always belonged to the Halkomelem-speaking peoples.  This was learning unlike anything I’d encountered before.  Begun with an act of seasonal care for local apple, cherry, pear, and plum trees, continued with an introduction to a named and loved sheep, grounded on land acknowledged to be unjustly occupied and abused.  Here was joy, relationship, respect, and accountability. I pretty much floated through every part of this first experience.  It was such a gift. 

It is a gift that keeps on giving.  Before coming to EartHand, my textile art practice was limited to traditional fibre-based practices like embroidery, sewing, knitting, and felting.  While I remain grateful for the skills passed on to me by my mother and grandmothers— and there’s still much joy to be had in such creative endeavours—it has been a delight to see my practice both expanded and transformed through learning ancestral, land-based skills.  I absolutely love every part of working with wool, from point of shearing to point of wearing.  But I am body-and-soul captivated by all the ways we two-leggeds can collaborate with plant kin—from dye and bast fibre magic to basketry.  This has been transformational on so many levels and I am deeply grateful.

I look forward to sharing out of my love and respect for the community, for ancestral skills, and for the gifts of the land, as both an instructor (which I prefer to think of as a learning circle facilitator, but I’m wordy sometimes) and as a working artist Board member.  

Website: https://sandravanderschaaf.ca/

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Chair & Stewardship liaison

Carla Frenkel is a maker, mother, designer, gardener and community builder. Formally trained in architecture, she spent over a decade working on affordable housing, urban design, and natural building. For 4 years she served as chair of the Strathcona Community Garden where she spearheads the wetland project to bolster biodiversity, manage stormwater, and create an urban sanctuary. A passionate cyclist, you can find her about town, swimming, foraging for dye mushrooms or snacks for her 2 fluffy fibre bunnies.

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Stewardship liaison

Mand is a lover of all things textile, and politically identifies as a spinster. They are grateful to find community and co-conspirators through EartHand.  With a long time practice of spinning local and forged fibres, and newer to actual weaving, they have used the metaphors of spinning and weaving, to describe much of their life’s work for the past 2 decades. Mand brings together the physical act of textile making and the work of community care to create cloth pieces that aim to tell our stories. 

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Founding Executive Director & Nurse Log

Sharon Kallis – As the founding lead artist of EartHand Gleaners Society, I, along with the EartHand community, create spaces for shared experiences to relearn reciprocity and empathy with plants and animals. I plan seasonal activities guided by plants and share my ongoing discoveries through workshops, conversations, and collaborative inquiries. I am honored to call the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations my home. The urban parks straddling Skwácháy̓s—now known as Means of Production Garden and Trillium North Park—are my collaborators in building relationships as I steward these stolen lands .

My book, Common Threads: Weaving Community Through Collaborative Eco-Art, was published by New Society Publishers in 2014 and is used in many post secondary programs as a model for creative engagement in shared green spaces.

Website: https://sharonkallis.wordpress.com

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Chantelle Chan- treasurer bio to be posted

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