At the heart of My Bones Are Funny are two pieces that face off in the middle gallery space: My Guardian Angel Is Tired (2023) is hung across from the video installation Things I Learn From My Grandmother’s Giggle (2023). My Guardian Angel is a large five-part self-portrait, which exhibition curator Emma Hassencahl-Perley informed me was actually installed by the artist himself. “It was so art school,” she says with a laugh. “He bent the wire against a doorframe and nailed it into a two-by-four.” In each of the five photos, which together form one complete self-portrait, Kimble is covered by a different substance: dirt, sugar, honey, bubbles, and snow. According to Hassencahl-Perley, each material has unique significance. The dirt signifies buried sexual trauma; the snow, an absence of emotion. The honey pulls double duty as a symbol of alcohol abuse and of preservation, honey being the main ingredient in mead but also the only food in the world that never expires. The sugar indicates addiction, and the bubbles, levity.

The video installation across the gallery is domestic, perhaps even mundane at first glance: the artist, off-camera, asks his grandmother to translate English phrases into Chipewyan. “This is my house,” says Kimble from behind the camera. Their grandmother interprets the phrase, bursting into a giggle at the end. Her laugh is warm and infectious, her smile lines deep; she sits with her hands behind her back, open to the camera. “What do you want?” says Kimble. “Who are you?” These questions, in the context of the colonization of Chipewyan lands by European settlers, juxtapose eerily with Kimble’s grandmother’s ease in her home. Interspersed with these interview clips are shots of waves lapping at a shoreline, quiet and constant. Love and affection flow effortlessly between the artist and matriarch. “The things I learn from my grandmother’s giggle can never be taught inside a classroom,” writes Kimble on their website. 

In the series Grow Up, Kimble presents more self-portraiture, this time a combination of current and childhood photos. Over these, they have pasted shiny letters resembling party balloons. They spell out maxims that combine personal reflection with levity: “take yourself to seriously” [sic] reads Grow Up #13 (2022), a pouty glamour shot where the artist sports a string of pearls. Hassencahl-Perley tells me that these pieces were inspired by the artist’s therapy sessions, wherein they spoke with their inner child. Coming of age, the loss of innocence, and surviving one’s twenties (arguably the last time most people can acceptably behave like children) are all mourned in these playful works.

Another exhibition highlight is It’s All So Incredibly Loud (Rage) (2025). This series of self-portraits is embroidered with tiny, blood-red beads, which gather at Kimble’s tear ducts and gradually fall, filling the frame. 

“My great-grandmother was a beautiful beader,” writes Kimble, “my grandmother could bead, my mom can kind of, and I can barely. It’s All So Incredibly Loud talks about having the knowledge of a historical expression inside of you but not having direct access to that knowledge.” 

Beadwork is a cherished art form and traditional practice in many Indigenous cultures; to this day, beading often carries important symbolism, tells stories, and serves as a historical record. Despite the efforts of colonizing bodies, Indigenous beadwork has survived as an enduring art form. 

“While mainly speaking about reviving knowledges within the body, [It’s All So Incredibly Loud] also explores the overwhelming nature of being alive and the loss that comes with it,” writes Kimble. “There are days […] where the grief is barely visible and days where it is the only thing I can see, it really depends on the day, which is also why I made the conscious decision to add loose beads physically inside the frame, it always shows up different.”

When I meet Jake Kimble for the first time, they’re sitting behind a table with Emma Hassencahl-Perley, and I have to dodge the many gallery visitors approaching to have their books signed by the artist. Jake has a new tattoo, which is visibly crispy, and they confirm for me with a laugh that it is definitely itchy. 

“It’s a Florence and the Machine lyric,” they say, indicating that it stretches all the way from shoulder to wrist. “I was just listening to Lungs this morning in my car,” I blurt, which is true but feels like something a journalist would make up to make their subject feel at ease. As more patrons cluster behind me, I quickly get Kimble’s email address and promise to reach out soon.

I visited the Beaverbrook on a warm Thursday evening while most people were still in five o’clock traffic. In the quiet of the gallery, while I was watching Things I Learn, I heard a sudden exclamation: “WOOOAAAAHHH.” Two young men, in jerseys and baseball caps, had snuck in without my notice, and they were staring at My Guardian Angel Is Tired in awe. “Jake…Kimble,” I heard one of them say, as they searched the artist up online on one of their phones. I would love to know what struck them, but I think that’s also the beauty of the piece: it’s multifaceted, such that you never know how it will resonate with another person.

My Bones Are Funny, Sometimes They Ache is human messiness, and that’s what makes it engrossing. Kimble’s self-portraiture plays with Western gender roles, teasing the line between masculine and feminine, celebrating their Two-Spirit identity. Double entendres abound in Kimble’s performance of gender and in the language used to describe it. Translation and interpretation between Indigenous cultural mainstays—art forms, languages, gender expressions, all the practices that make a people—and their Canadian counterparts form an evident throughline in this exhibition. Many of the pieces are named in English but include a Chipewyan parenthetical title; the deliberate historical attempts of colonizers to eradicate Indigenous languages contextualize Kimble’s decision not to translate every single word into English. It feels like the artist is gently saying: Yours are not the only words that matter. Listen, let me (and my grandmother) teach you something.

Emotion spills over everywhere in this exhibition, whether it be in sticky sweet honey, overflowing tears, a pie smashed into a face, or the prints made using paper towels as canvases. Kimble neglects to clean up for us. He flaunts this truth, this reclamation of body and all of its uncomfortable ambiguities. Their (sometimes literally) cheeky self-portraits are strange enough to make us laugh and vulnerable enough to make us cry. 

“Jake doesn’t like to describe [humour] as a coping mechanism,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “It’s more of a survival instinct.” 

After all, the funny bone aches, too. 

Shannon Harvey: It’s clear from my visit and from speaking to Emma that humour is a central theme in this exhibition. What is your personal sense of humour like?

Jake Kimble: I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I am a serious artist. 

SH: Alongside the humour, there are veins of grief, rage, and coming-of-age / loss of innocence throughout this exhibition. Can you speak to how (and why) you wove these feelings together?

JK: One of my favourite lessons I’ve learned with growing older is that those two feelings do not have to be mutually exclusive and are more often than not bedfellows. I had an acting teacher once explain that there will always be joy when expressing sadness because when someone truly allows themselves to feel—whether that be anger, fear, or pain, et cetera—authentically it feels good. Because it feels good to honour your body and your spirit. 

SH: There is a lot of wordplay going on in My Bones Are Funny, and you invoke your grandmother’s first language in a beautiful video installation where you ask her to translate different phrases. You also do not exclusively use English in the titles for your pieces. Can you tell me about your use and choice of language?

JK: I’m thinking about accessibility to language, particularly my access to my native language Chipewyan, which I am still learning. I’m trying to wake up the language for my tongue. I should know how to speak Chip, but it’s minimal at best, so naming works of mine [using] phrases in my language helps me practise and keep it awake. 

SH: Were there any significant challenges or personal struggles that emerged while creating these pieces? If so, how did you overcome those or incorporate them into the works? Or, alternatively, did the entire process go smoothly, and if so, why do you think that was?

JK: It’s been so lovely to see all of these works shown together, because it’s almost a soft retrospective of my development—both as an artist and as a human being. Uncovering who I am and seeing how I operate is a fun thread that connects them all. I think overcoming my preconceived notions of what makes a “serious artist” is something that I learned to get over pretty quick, but making sure I stay over that idea is what has actually been challenging. So just remaining true to me and my funny way of doing things is what I hold on to, because that is what resonates, I find. 

SH: Is there one work from this exhibition that you would consider the “heart” or centrepiece of My Bones Are Funny?

 JK: My Guardian Angel Is Tired, I think, is the anchor of this exhibition, it is very much the work that exists in the middle of all of the pieces and connects them all. 

SH: Are there any other themes that emerged while you were working, perhaps themes you were surprised by? Are there themes that you find people often don’t pick up on, that you wish they saw or felt?

 JK: Seeing them all together was an interesting thing for me, because I never really understood how much pain there is in the works (don’t get me wrong, there is just as much humour). Recognizing that has made me hug myself a little more and treat myself with a little more kindness. 

The first things to catch the eye are the large orange fish. Originally suspended as banners during the exhibition’s presentation at the Venice Biennale, the drawings now stretch across the gallery walls. Rendered in Jonas’s rapid hand, the fish recall the Ensō, the Zen circle, rendered in uninhibited brushstrokes that are said to emerge from a “no-mind” state, conveying the freedom of flow. The fish feel alive, not from any attempt at realism but because they are breaking containment of form, splashing outside of the lines. One can almost hear the smack of a wet brush on paper. 

Passing through a threshold of colour I can only describe as “underwater-photography blue”—a blue that suggests infinite aquatic reaches—the exhibition opens into an environment of moving images, drawings, mirrors, sculptures, and theatre-like viewing boxes. Positioned within are two room-sized theatre boxes inviting visitors inside and two smaller wooden viewers. Sea creatures glide across projected bodies. Everywhere, drawing persists: on walls, on paper, and in the gestures of Jonas’s own filmed performances.

The instinct, at least for this reviewer, is to begin searching for labels. Anything to explain, to provide context. There are remarkably few. It soon becomes clear that this is not an exhibition meant to be consumed artwork by artwork but as a whole, operating as a single environment—an ecosystem—asking viewers to move through it slowly, allowing confluences between its parts to emerge. When I later mention this to co-curator David Diviney, he smiles in recognition.

“It operates as a singular work,” he says. “We invite people to enter the gallery space, immerse themselves in the installation, and experience it on their own terms.”

That trust in the gallery-goers is one of the exhibition’s defining qualities.

Rather than directing visitors toward a prescribed interpretation, We Come From the Sea emboldens the visitor’s intuition. Meanings accumulate, through repeated encounters with recurring images, gestures, sounds, and materials. Given the duration-based nature of the work, Diviney says, “It encourages people to spend time in the space and with each of the different elements. Along the way, a deeply personal experience begins to unfold.”

That unfolding has characterized Jonas’s practice for more than five decades. Widely recognized as one of the pioneers of performance and video art, the New York artist first emerged in the late sixties, when visual artists, dancers, filmmakers, and composers were working fluidly across disciplines. During an artist talk following the exhibition’s opening, Jonas recalled taking workshops with dancers because she’d never formally studied performance.

“I developed a way of moving in relation to a subject,” she said.

That emphasis on movement continues to shape her work today. Rather than illustrating and defining ideas, Jonas circles around them, approaching them from different angles through drawing, choreography, film, storytelling, mythology, sculpture, and sound. Each medium reveals something the others cannot; all are connected by the artist’s curiosity. 

Cape Breton/Unama’ki has been foundational to that evolution. Jonas first travelled there in 1970 with a group of artists that included Richard Serra and Philip Glass, returning nearly every summer since. When Diviney remarked to her that the island has served such a significant part of both her life and her practice, her response was immediate: “I literally fell in love with it.”

The influence runs deeper than land- and seascape alone. Jonas has spoken often of her fascination with Gaelic traditions, ceilidhs (“kitchen parties”), Celtic poetry, local dance, and the rhythms of coastal life. These experiences became woven into an artistic vocabulary that refuses to separate human culture from the natural world.

That relationship—that symbiosis—ultimately led to Moving Off the Land II, the body of work from which We Come From the Sea emerges.

“I started out very simply,” Jonas explained. “I asked myself: How do I make a piece about the ocean, which is a vast subject? How do you start?”

Her answer is not to explain the ocean. It’s to change the way we relate to it. Consider the ways we discuss sea life, calling it “otherworldly” and the creatures therein “alien.” Jonas continually reminds us of how partial our own perception really is, how we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world. We’re wrong to do this, implies Jonas. Look at us with our finlike hands and our tentacle arms, these pieces (especially the video installations) seem to say, we really do come from the sea! In one section of the exhibition, fish, shells, and found objects sit within a thick rippled glass vitrine resembling an aquarium. They shimmer and change slightly as viewers move past them. Elsewhere, similarly rippled mirrors transform the gallery into an aquarium, rendering the visitors as though they were underwater. These strange sea-apes slip in and out of view. Even Jonas’s drawings resist stillness and completion. Their loose lines suggest fish without fully describing them, yet preserving something of their flitting movement and darting, quicksilver unpredictability. Everything in the show becomes slippery, hard to hold. 

Marine biologist David Gruber became one of Jonas’s important collaborators while developing the project. “He deals with the perception of fish,” she said, “and I deal with perception as well.”

Gruber’s research explores forms of marine bioluminescence invisible to the human eye. “We can’t see the fish the way they see each other,” Jonas observed. “Through David’s lens you realize how bright it is down there and how colourful, but we can’t see that.”

The exhibition, in its own submerged way, asks what else remains beyond human perception. Artist and design educator Angela Henderson sees this concern running through Jonas’s entire practice. “I think she alters our perception,” Henderson told me at the exhibition opening. “She’s really skillful at asking us to look more closely at what we don’t see—or what we do see, for that matter.”

Rather than offering certainty, Henderson argues, Jonas invites viewers into a more demanding form of attention. “The viewer has to do a lot of work,” she says, “not necessarily to understand what’s happening, but to feel what’s happening.”

That distinction feels crucial. Much contemporary environmental art relies on urgency, statistics, or catastrophe. Jonas chooses to swim in another stream. Her work nods toward ecological precarity without becoming heavy-handed. It is less interested in persuading than in inviting sustained attention.

“She is paying tribute to the ocean, its creatures, the biodiversity, and delicate ecology,” Diviney explains. “On a certain level, the work is intended to raise awareness, but its core takeaway is the call to action—urging visitors to reflect on their own relationship with the sea.”

That invitation takes on a particularly moving form in the exhibition’s youngest participants. In the films, children perform, read, improvise, and move through imagined underwater worlds.

“The children will inherit this,” Jonas explained to Diviney at the artist talk. “I thought it was important for them to represent themselves in the work because they’re the ones who are going to inherit it.”

This statement lands with surprising force. The kids are not symbols of innocence or optimism. They’re collaborators. Jonas never asks them to perform predetermined roles. “I never tell them exactly what to do,” she explained. “I set up improvisational situations.”

Their presence reminds viewers that environmental stewardship extends across generations.

Rachel Carson’s spirit moves through the exhibition as well. Jonas dedicated the work to the pioneering marine biologist and author of Silent Spring, describing Carson as “a scientist, but also a poet in the way she wrote.”

Science and imagination are never opposing forces here. They coexist comfortably, just as mythology sits beside marine biology and performance beside drawing. Perhaps that is why We Come From the Sea feels so generous. It refuses easy conclusions.

As Henderson observed, “You can’t just go to that exhibition and be an observer. Being a witness and being an observer are two very different things.” To witness requires patience and intuition. It requires lingering inside uncertainty. It asks something of us.

Before leaving the gallery, I found myself returning to one of the theatre boxes, watching the entire cycle of video clips, waiting for my favourite section. In the cycle, Jonas, in a long white coat and white trousers, moves in front of projected video images of underwater life. The clips play across Jonas and the screen behind her. My favourite clip features Jonas dwarfed by an underwater close-up of a seal and dancing with it. She moves, accommodating its bulbous calf-eyes and long whiskers, reacting to its corkscrewing turns, chasing after it, grasping and catching nothing. The seal-image slips through fingers, she can’t even catch hold of a fin. Its movements are fluid and nubile, hers are shaky and elderly. At first, the clip struck me as a practice in futility. She can’t possibly affect it, cannot really interact with the seal, cannot catch in her hands what she is pursuing, and yet…And yet, through her dance with the images flickering over her form and the screen, she does. She does change it. The scene takes on the drama of an artist losing control of her drawing, and it is a glory. 

by Elissa Barnard

The airy ARTSPLACE Gallery, Annapolis Royal, is full of the whispering voices of history, hidden lives, and dropped threads in Julie Rosvall’s poetic and profound exhibit I am Torn and I am Mended.

In this show, the textile artist and printmaker takes two steps forward, adding new layers to an already meaningful, metaphoric art form. She decided to work with found lace garments, instead of her own knit lace pieces, for her soft ground etchings on paper, textile relief prints, and paper lithography. These aren’t Frenchys dive finds but articles she feels personally connected to as a maker.

As a person who loves old things and hates to waste anything, Rosvall has also taken her own damaged large-scale lithography prints, cut them into sections, and “mended” them in large visible stitches. She accents tears and creases with gold leaf in the style of kintsugi (Japanese golden repair).

Rosvall partly perceives her damaged prints and textiles as connected to her own “wonky body” as she continues to recover from knee surgery and a back injury. “Just because my knee doesn’t work doesn’t mean I don’t work,” she says. “You sew it up, you put it back together, and you carry on.”

As a craftsperson and former program director at Craft Nova Scotia, Rosvall cherishes patterning among people as much as in textiles. “It is all about connections whether it’s the mug you drink your coffee out of or a piece of jewelry. It’s about the connection to the maker and their respective world.”

In her diaphanous and mysterious images, she suggests historical narratives as she honours the process of craft-making and the often little-known makers of craft. Her broken and mended works beckon viewers to concoct their own stories, to ruminate on remnants and relics, to see imperfection as part of human life, and to perceive repair as an act of hope and honour. 

Mrs. Trask’s Skirt #1—Rhubarb, 2025, is a life-sized, textile relief print of a torn lace skirt on white cotton rag paper. Delicate, disconnected threads drift into an open hole of frayed edges; this hole becomes the edge of the universe, a jumping-off point into the unknown. 

In Mrs. Trask’s Skirt Remnant #3, 2025, Rosvall stitches up the hole on paper using hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn in highly visible mending, recalling mothers and grandmothers darning socks and sweaters. 

Rosvall reveals her love of nature, art, and community in the stories embedded in her work. Mrs. Trask’s Skirt is about Mrs. Gwendolyn Trask, an avid gardener like Rosvall, as well as a genealogist and baker active in her community of Yarmouth. Rosvall heard about Mrs. Trask on an episode of Sherrie Graham’s Nova Scotia Kitchens podcast in which Graham interviewed Mrs. Trask, her neighbour, as she made rhubarb clafoutis. One day when Graham helped her neighbour clean out her closets, she came across two skirts that Mrs. Trask’s mother, Huldah Guiou, had knit for her in the 1930s. 

As Graham tells it on her Substack: “I couldn’t quite bring myself to toss them without somehow acknowledging the beautiful handwork created almost a century ago, so I secretly squirrelled them away and contacted textile artist Julie Rosvall.”

The artist loves to work in black ink with forays into blue. However, for this piece she concocted a delicious pink close to the colour of the rhubarb in her garden. Viewers have responded so positively to this pink that Rosvall plans to experiment with more colour, specifically yellow for the second skirt. This yellow links to the forsythia in both Mrs. Trask’s and Rosvall’s yards.

In a lovely coincidence, the rhubarb connects to Wolfville fibre artist Jali Giroux (1959–2009), who gave Rosvall one of her three rhubarb patches. Giroux also knit Rosvall an onion-skin-dyed shawl as a thirtieth birthday present. The actual shawl, mended, is on exhibit as well as the artwork, Mended—Jali’s Shawl, 2024, a paper lithography, large-scale detail of the shawl repaired with gold leaf and in stitches that are rivulets of wool, making a landscape of the pattern. The wool Rosvall uses in her repairs belonged to Giroux.

Rosvall decided against any colour for her delicate white-on-white impressions—debossings on cotton rag paper—of the Greenspond doilies she found in the bottom of a basket shoved away on a shelf in a Newfoundland antique store. (They belong to a collection of found objects from her 2024 artist-in-residency at The Rooms / Parks Canada, Terra Nova National Park.)

She calls the doilies “ghosts.” No one knows who made them or how they got into that basket. “So much work went into them; they have an incredible history, and it’s a shame for them to disappear.”

Rosvall started knitting as a child and trained in weaving, spinning, dyeing, and knitting. In 2010 she encountered Canadian artist Betty Goodwin’s soft ground etchings of material and found objects, notably her iconic vest inspired by her father’s Montreal vest-making business. 

Rosvall’s first soft ground etching, in which an object is put directly through a press, was of her own Dutch-lace, six-by-six-inch swatch pattern printed with instruction from New Brunswick artist Bob Morouney of Hidden House Press. “That was the jumping off point.” 

I am Torn and I am Mended was at ARTSPLACE from February 21 to April 11, 2026, after being shown at the St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in 2025. Rosvall hopes to tour it to Newfoundland and her native New Brunswick.

As someone who thrives on human connection, Rosvall is part of an Annapolis Valley art group with Sheri Hancock, Sydney Lancaster, and Bonnie Baker; they exhibit “work that starts from one thing but becomes something else entirely” in Otherwise at Harvest Gallery, Wolfville, August 15 to September 13. She also belongs to the FoodArtNature community-based organization offering visitors and locals connections with Annapolis Valley producers, makers, chefs, and artisans.

In her careful, considerate use of hands-on, technical print methods, Rosvall creates a deeply layered form of contemporary art that is beautiful, homespun, and philosophical. 

(For Mrs. Trask’s rhubarb clafoutis recipe go to: Mrs Trask’s Rhubarb Clafoutis and Sherrie’s Rhubarb Custard Squares )

Bringing together Atlantic Canadian weavers, quilters, sculptors, basket makers, and storytellers to examine textiles, Conversation Threads, curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa, runs at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from February 28 to May 3, 2026. Seventeen artists are included, with work spanning decades and a sense of timelessness woven into their practice.

On opening night, I walked into the reception area through the gallery’s courtyard door, with music and conversations welcoming visitors. People dressed for the occasion with comfort in mind, that particular winter–spring calibration Nova Scotians manage intuitively.

Familiar faces gathered around the spiralling stairwell at the centre, drinks in hand, circling the same conversation: the Nova Scotia government’s recent proposal to cut arts, culture, heritage, and tourism funding. Grant programs were reduced or eliminated. The artists, administrators, gallerists, and others in the room, whose livelihoods are threaded into the fabric of this province, felt the weight, along with a growing frustration at how little care the provincial government showed the sector. The exhibition brought a reminder of why their work mattered.

Descending the stairs, I was greeted by Alana Morouney’s Knotwork, where two hands emerge from the form, one at the upper left and the other at the lower right. Rather than meeting in a handshake, the two wool hands, dyed with knotweed, extend from the intertwined lines of the knot itself. Each hand appears to hold the structure in place, as if steadying the woven form that binds them together. It is Morouney’s homage to the market vendors, local makers, and the people who sustain New Brunswick through seasonal tourism and daily trade. The piece asks what holds a community together once the tourist season ends and the attention moves on.

I walked past Knotwork, past the other pieces on the walls and the crowds who adored them. Then Darlene Baker’s I Am Conflicted About This Relationship stood on its own: a silver gas tank covered in pink tones and floral decoration. The object is both nostalgic and uncomfortable. Baker shows her family’s gas station and auto repair shop as a space that shaped her early understanding of femininity, patriarchy, and ecological cost, experiences she absorbed long before she had the language to name them. The work holds the tenderness of what was alongside the damage beneath it, without resolving either into something easier.

Across from the gas tank, another colourful work stood out: Albert Lohnes’s The Red, White, and Blue Crocheted Rocking Chair. Made sixty years ago, the piece could not have anticipated what the Canada–US relationship would look like now, but it did not need to. The knitted work covers and moulds itself to the chair’s frame, with the American flag woven into the seat. Some tensions, it turns out, have always been rocky.

Next, I walked toward Portrait of the Artist as an Essential Worker by Hannah Genosko and Sarah Mosher. The work consists of two quilts made from uniforms the artists wore during the COVID-19 pandemic, one from Canada Post and the other from the NSLC. The garments hung on the gallery walls, documenting what traditional media and its sensational news cycles cannot by holding in place the anxiety, the daily risk, the labour of showing up. Frontline workers are often spoken about during crises and less often afterward. This work, along with the recent national postal strike, highlights the consequences of overlooking those who hold society together.

Past several more works, Oakley Wysote Gray’s Lapigot — Small Pox is where the exhibition’s weight gathered most intensely. A bodysuit stands draped with a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket, its famous red, yellow, and green stripes marred by bloodstains. Lacework across the fabric suggests the marks of smallpox rashes. Tears and slashes open at the torso and thighs. Gray, from Listuguj First Nation, made the piece as part of a collection titled Mei Eimotieg — we are still here. A fitting title for a work made in 2024, a year before the Hudson’s Bay Company declared bankruptcy after 355 years of operation. The blanket carries centuries of colonial history: the consequences of exploitation, disease transmission, and the displacement of Indigenous communities from their lands. Gray’s piece was already doing its work before the closing. Yet, the collapse of the institution does not erase its history; it just makes the stain more visible.

These five works, among seventeen, demonstrate what textiles have always done: archive the things that official records miss. Labour. Frontline life. Colonial harm. Generational knowledge is passed hand to hand, stitch by stitch, like a community refusing to let go of itself.

Divine timing or pure coincidence, the show opened at the right moment. For everyone in that room carrying uncertainty about what comes next, the works offered evidence of a long-enduring Maritime resilience that has always found ways to hold itself together and pass that knowledge on. Fabiyino lets the pieces breathe out the essence of preservation and resistance rooted in this place. What became clear is that the thread, regardless of how much it is pulled, stretched, or pressed from every direction, does not need permission to hold.

Rooted in the forests of Cap Rouge, Donica Larade’s art practice highlights native flora and fauna and encourages conversations around conservation, ecology action, and queer experience. Donica’s ability to capture fleeting moments in nature’s moments of kismet is unique. Whether they’re exploring a fresh flush of edible maritime mushrooms, studying the anatomy of a Highland fairy, or embedding sea rocket and a gannet wing into a cyanotype quilt, her attention feels exact and alive. Her unique ability to articulate a moment shines through.

Larade comes from an Acadian family displaced in the Expulsion, and the stories of that time live on in her art and profound relationship to the Cape Breton Highlands. Her mediums shift with the seasons, but an environmental throughline ties the work together.

In the wild, you’ll find Donica carrying a large tote bag full of various art supplies: some gouache, a well-worn watercolour palette, acrylic paint markers, or even cyanotype chemicals—she’s primed to create at a moment’s notice. A self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, their practice moves fluidly across materials, often drawing on second-hand finds and objects from the natural world. Donica’s work reminds us that realism doesn’t have to omit mysticism and storytelling.

Kyra Lambert: Tell me a little about your arts practice as currently is and where you tend to draw influence from.

Donica Larade: My process of creating has always been chaotic and unpredictable. Everything in your life has the ability to inspire art, especially the unexpected or mundane. Some concepts creep up and grow slowly over time, and some hit me like a freight train. I’ll be watching a movie or in the grocery store and frantically scribbling something down in my notes app. Sketchbooks then help me flesh ideas out and explore what medium to communicate them with. Themes I’ve been exploring recently involve mythology, philosophy, symbolism, death and natural cycles, local plants and animals, social justice movements, and generally the whimsy of the natural world. 

KL: How does your Chéticamp home base influence your arts perspective and practice? 

DL: Cape Breton is one of the only places I know where being an artist is taken seriously as a career path. Growing up spending time in Chéticamp, I was influenced by theatre productions, musicals, dances, and festivals that showed me art was culturally essential. As a kid, I walked door to door selling my drawings because I felt confident people around me valued art. A mix of wonderful landscapes, island artists, seriously funny people, and a rich culture that celebrates expression has been a winning formula for me.

KL: What pieces of folklore from Cape Breton do you hold close? 

DL: The fairies of Cape Breton Island are the creatures I’m most drawn to in regards to island mythology. The folklore I’ve most heavily focused on in my previous work has explored visual symbolism and tales associated with fairies. Something that compels me most about fairy lore is their presence throughout various communities found on Cape Breton Island, such as the Mi’kmaq, Gaelic, and Acadian people. It’s very telling of their cultural impact and powerful abilities. 

KL: All art, yours especially, “keeps record” of species and stories around our immediate environment. What drew you to this type of art practice?

DL: I think what first drew me to this type of note taking was in part my own discovery and curiosity for the species that lived locally. Observation and pattern recognition is a part of both the scientific and artistic process. I constantly traipse around with my nose inside guidebooks or the apps eBird and iNaturalist. The realization that many people are unaware of some of the amazing species in their own backyard and have that same curiosity pushed me into this style of highlighting them in my art. Flying squirrels, purple coral mushrooms, and saw-whet owls are only some of the incredible, unique species that people might not associate with the East Coast. 

KL: You have a very special ability in connecting people to the wealth of species in their immediate environment. Do you have any stories that come to mind when you think about introducing people to local invertebrates, or mushrooms? (Connecting people to their environment can be so empowering and supports interdependence, accessibility in education through the arts.)

DL: I think it can be difficult to choose one specific memory because of the way it’s completely integrated into my life and daily activities. However, some of my most memorable experiences in scientific communication have been with children. They are the most curious, ask the best questions, and hold the most unbridled joy. In our interactions, I often find myself thinking more creatively, pushing the limits of my own understanding, and being challenged into trying to explain complex genetic theory to an eight-year-old asking about butterflies. It’s incredibly rewarding to support young people on their own journeys of understanding the world around them. 

KL: How do you interact with the wider Nova Scotia arts scene? Where is your place in it? 

DL: Coming from a non-traditional art background has in turn led to a non-traditional relationship with the Nova Scotia art community. At times, I’ve felt isolated as an artist because of my lack of formal education. It can feel difficult to make connections and obtain the right resources without the formal structure that school can offer. Thankfully, living in small artistic towns like Chéticamp, Seaforth, and Antigonish, and taking part in residencies and festivals, has been deeply healing for my imposter syndrome. These experiences, as well as making connections with other artists and mentors, have allowed me to mitigate my feelings of insecurity in my art practice and feel like an essential piece in our art world. It takes all kinds in the arts, and my unique journey and experiences created my own niche in the scene. 

KL: How does art influence ecologically minded spaces? Is there a specific conservation effort in NS you’d like to call attention to? 

DL: Traditionally, art and science have always been entwined in a way in which one was rarely found without the other. Note taking, sketching, or illustrating are an essential resource in the sciences to help convey information. Looking back at extraordinary naturalists like Maria Sibylla Merian, Ernst Haeckel, or Anna Atkins, I think the relationship between science and art was much more widely acknowledged and appreciated before the twenty-first century than it is today. For me, the beauty of illustration and its role in the sciences is to communicate difficult or interesting concepts, advocate on behalf of species and the environment, and celebrate the mysticality of nature. There are too many amazing conservation efforts to mention just one, but CPAWS, Nature Nova Scotia, and the Ecology Action Centre offer great resources for conservation work being done in your area!