About EartHand Gleaners Artist in Residence Program
EartHand invites a local artist or artists to do a deep dive into our methodology of being makers without first being consumers. The invited artist/ artist team will have a current practice that overlaps with at least one of EartHand’s three core areas of focus: community engagement, environmental focus and hand-based skills development.
Residencies are 1-3 years in length and include free participation in selected EartHand paid programs for skill-share, teaching opportunities for the EartHand community and co-planned social/maker events that build on our collective skills and interests.
It is our goal that the skills and community that an artist brings to the EartHand fold will further enrich our community knowledge and scope of reach. And, that any artist in residence with EartHand broadens their personal arts practice by a ‘looking through the lens of local’ materials-use awareness. Both a personal and maker’s relationship to nature is developed through time in the gardens EartHand tends, including a seasonal understanding of sustainable material/ plant kin relationships and the stewardship of those plants. EartHand is funding this program through earned revenue, providing modest research stipends for the artist and EartHand’s Sharon Kallis to have time together.
2022 and 2023
Meagan Innes
Sḵwx̱wú7mesh/Scottish/Hawaiian/German/Ukrainian/Jewish
Meagan Innes is from Xwmélts’tstn úxwumixw (Capilano Village). She is a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh slhánay̓(Squamish Woman), an Educator and a multidisciplinary Artist.
Meagan completed her MEd around examining connection to place, kinship and to spéńem (plant) s7eḵw’í7tel (siblings) péńem (plant things). She is an emerging artist who is waking up her Ancestral skills and practicing the ways of her Ancestors. She is exploring reshaping pedagogy to embody traditional ways of knowing and being, more specifically Sḵwx̱wú7mesh traditional ways of learning, knowing and being. She had recently completed the First Nations Language Program at Simon Fraser University to become a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim speaker which is the language of her Ancestors. Meagan loves to work with her hands, utilizing traditional materials and objects to create cultural works that are utilized for their intended purposes. Her practice includes, but is not limited to, weaving with a variety of natural fibres, animal hides, and plant materials as dyes and pigments. Her practice is guided by her Ancestors.
A loom was designed and built by David Gowman, and becomes our foundation and the materials an invitation to conversations about place, belonging and truth. The top beam of the loom is a cottonwood tree from the garden that grew 50 ft from the loom location.
A collaboration with community members, this work is always in progress, it is never perfect.
But we show up for each other and bring what we can to hold each other up.
Working with wool from sheep on Barnston Island, and the plants that grow in the area of Sḵwácháys that is now Trillium Park, participants in EartHand programs assisted in the carding, dying and spinning of the wool for the residency.
This work will be ongoing throughout 2023.
Anna Heywood Jones
Anna Heywood-Jones is a settler artist and educator based on the traditional, contemporary and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. Through her work, Heywood-Jones explores the complex relationship between human and botanical spheres, often articulated through textile materials and processes. Additionally, her artistic practice is dedicated to exploring the slow loss of her father and the recent birth of her son. She holds an MFA degree from NSCAD University, a BFA degree from Emily Carr University and a diploma in Fibre Arts from Kootenay School of the Arts. During her time as an artist-in-residence with EartHand Gleaners Society, Anna Heywood-Jones plans to collaboratively create handspun and handwoven textile swatches made with plant fibres grown by EartHand and wool raised by Barnston Island producers. During the summer and fall seasons, the swatches will be dyed with the many colour-bearing plants growing at Means of Production and Trillium North garden sites.
Building on previous work done on the east coast (Tinctorial Cartographies), Anna wishes to create a textile record of the relationship between the animals, plants and people that circulate within the EartHand fibre-shed and community skill-shed. This project promises to be part scientific experiment, part learning tool and part poetic exploration.
View the PDF here of the local cloth swatches created by Anna in 2022 with help from the Earthand community for processing and spinning the fibres.
Anna and Meagan will both continue their work in the gardens tended by EartHand throughout 2023 with Sharon Kallis continuing to work alongside.
2021: T’uy’t’tanat – Cease Wyss and Jolene Andrew
Down from the Mountains: into the city
How do the plants and fibres define a culture? A place?
What are the similar pedagogies and teachings being reciprocated between two culturally distinct styles in weaving and other Indigenous technologies and design.
How do we identify the proper relationship to the land where we stand when we come from somewhere else?
How do we inspire respect and awareness of our kinship to the plants and animals with whom we share this place?
And how – when our ancestors have come from afar – can we be local-focused makers and be good allies in of support of waking sleeping knowledge for Indigenous peers?
Jolene Andrew and Cease Wyss embark on a learning journey, learning about traditions in making ceremonial and functional everyday items from yellow cedar and mountain goat, and other elements from the respective territories and teachings.
What they learn through the year influences and shapes the direction for community research and participatory events hosted by EartHand Gleaners both virtually and in two urban educational learning gardens.
Collectively we wish to unpack how allies can make space for traditional knowledge transfer and cultural development in community – so that all people in community can benefit from the teachings. We need to all understand the importance of autonomy and knowledge sharing to foremostly centre, respect, and uphold knowledge to belong to the Indigenous community members, and benefit the community the most when it comes to sharing traditional knowledge.
A combination of online zoom talks/demonstrations and in-person park time will be shaped based on pandemic response requirements. Various interactions will be added to the calendar throughout the year, check the events page for Down From the Mountain listings or sign up for the newsletter to stay informed.
Stitch and Strategize: 2019/2020
A Slow Clothing Collaboration
Amy Walker of Makemobile joins Sharon Kallis, plus invited friends, colleagues and passers-by
as EartHand’s first Artist in Residence from 2019-2020. Collectively we will explore themes of slow clothing; reciprocity; occupying/activating/living and working in public space; mending; repair; natural & sustainable materials; climate action; building relationships with each other, with the city, with passers-by and invited friends.
