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. 

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!

In mouth them like words, Angela Henderson welcomes viewers into a space that feels quiet, careful, and a little mysterious. On view at StFX Art Gallery from February 25 to April 4, the exhibition brings together graphite drawings nestled within free-standing wooden structures that subtly shape how you move through the gallery. Her line work shifts between intention and instinct, between the clarity of design and forms that seem to rise up from somewhere harder to name. The installation feels like a living archive, one that asks you to slow your pace, come closer, and spend time with images that do not resolve all at once. In this conversation, she reflects on ambiguity, restraint, and the conditions she creates to allow something unexpected to surface.

Your title, mouth them like words, feels tactile and embodied. Where did that phrase come from?

A lot of the titles I’ve used in the past have come from poetic references—Anne Carson and Forugh Farrokhzad—but not this one.

My partner is a poet, and reading his work influences me. I think I’m inspired by the embodied quality of words on the page—language in any place, really. Lately, a lot of my work has resulted in hybrid forms that are hard to name. I was thinking about the mouth as the place where we speak language. There’s this visceral, mouth-like quality that feels close to naming but also to being unable to name.

If I were to think about a mouthful of ambiguity—how would I name it? I don’t know. That’s kind of where the title comes from.

Many of the forms feel pared down, almost elemental. What draws you to that economy of line?

My background is in design, particularly architectural and spatial design. I’m interested in material quality and structure. Often my drawing practice veers toward the maximal—more and more and more—but the structures that hold those forms feel like metaphysical devices. They’re frameworks that hold ambiguous life forms or images.

There’s a contrast there. The structures are drawings in and of themselves. I imagine them as part of a lifelong system—an ongoing design and development of these forms. They’re members of a kind of evolving structure.

Where did this body of work feel most difficult?

There’s always a lot of fastidiousness in what I do—time spent. In the drawings, especially, I’ve developed a practice that tries to create the conditions for something meditative, where the subconscious can come forward. It becomes about drawing and witnessing what emerges.

That sounds good, but often it’s frustrating. Creating those conditions isn’t always easy. It depends on mood, on the day.

I’m also a parent. There’s guilt—long periods spent alone are when that process becomes most accessible. Sometimes I feel guilty for that. Other times I feel like I’m not spending enough time with myself. It’s a difficult balance.

Do you think of these works as contemporary, or as belonging to a longer timeline of mark-making and symbolic practice?

Both. There’s something pre-verbal in the work. Through the process I described, forms emerge that are hard to name. I relate that to ancient or pre-verbal knowledge.

At the same time, practices like tarot or divination tools project a way forward. They depart from rationalist binaries—right/wrong, good/bad—that we see increasingly in society. There’s hopefulness in ambiguous or mysterious tools. They propose alternative ways of seeing and naming.

How do orientation and scale shape the viewer’s experience?

You have to look at my drawings with dedication. Often your body comes very close to the paper. The viewer is rewarded by spending time.

In this exhibition, I thought about ambulating—about circumambulation, which suggests ritual or spiritual practice. Ambulation isn’t a straight line; it’s circulatory. I also tried to insert my own body into the forms, literally, through scale—heights, widths.

I wanted to create a scaled environment that slows the viewer down and brings them close to the surface.

How does a drawing begin for you? And how do you know it’s finished?

A drawing begins as curiosity or observation. I often work with found forms. I might trace something—blind contour, physical objects, or carbon tracing. The reference point is intuitive, often coming from walking, being in nature, observing trees, leaves, insects—things outside my window.

I’ve also worked with psychoanalytic practice for about eight years. I use tools that access subconscious thought—active imagination, for example. 

I don’t use erasers. The drawing evolves. I follow what emerges.

As for finished, it’s a feeling. When there’s enough depth and complexity, I feel it’s complete.

The works hover between abstraction and something almost legible. Are you interested in that threshold?

Yes. Ambiguity is a goal in my work. I value holding multiple things at once without resolution.

I’m interested in how images unfold and contain many references. I love the work of Marcel Dzama, for example. I feel a trajectory toward identifying figures or reference points that could develop a narrative quality.

How did the installation shape the meaning of the work?

When I installed the show, I realized I had designed the wooden forms to meet and facilitate the drawings. I imagine those structures returning in future exhibitions to house new drawings—like a growing archive.

I was trying to create a quiet archive. The line work and forms reference botanical drawing—the way we archive and document plant or animal life.

Can you speak about your material choices—graphite, coloured pencil, mylar?

Many materials come from my design background. I use CAD for structural designs. The washi paper I work with is incredibly responsive to graphite—it holds it in nuanced ways. At times it feels like a dead end, but it does something specific.

In this show I experimented with watercolour paper in the central form. I’m interested in moving toward tracing papers or translucent materials—where drawing becomes more three-dimensional.

The blue pencil comes from architectural construction lines. When plotted, those lines disappear. They’re subtle construction marks.

There’s quietness in the exhibition, but also tension. How do you think about restraint?

My process can be obsessive, right up until the night before installation. I’m always trying to pare things down.

There’s restraint in how the pieces fit together, the structures that tilt and move, almost like flat-packed furniture.

I grew up in a small closed religious community. Dogma is something I’m embedded with but push against. Restraint sometimes comes from setting rules: no colour, one colour, this paper only. Creating conditions through limitation.

There’s much more work that isn’t in the show than is. Sketches upon sketches—my own archive in manila folders.

Do you think of drawing as a form of divination?

I like that idea. Without erasers, drawing becomes like watching clouds. “Oh, there’s an ear—I’ll follow it.” Sometimes I almost speak to it: Why are you here? What are you showing me?

It may sound strange, but I’m trying to draw from subconscious space. Perhaps even from a collective unconscious—the roots under trees, the mycelium.

The divination, if anything, is about creating conditions for unfolding and then letting it happen. Witnessing and participating while trying to quiet the thinking mind.

Everything begins with close observation—botanical forms, trees, leaves, insects. But once that reference is on the page, it departs. The visible is the starting point. Through process, it becomes post-observational—an unfolding.

Ross Nervig is the Editor of Visual Arts News.

By Karin Cope 

Two Pansies, a collaborative exhibition installed at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery during the fall of 2025, featured colourful, whimsical, and deeply serious eco-feminist dialogues in paint, sculpture, video, and performance by two emerging queer artists, Autumn Star and Shay Donovan. An expansive show filled with paired paintings of uncanny figures in luscious colours, performances in animal and flower costumes, and moving, human-sized snail, fish, bird, and spider sculptural forms, Two Pansies makes an argument that queer and trans bodily change is about more than “sex,” “gender,” or “human” morphologies and relationships. It is also about the beauty of emergence and the ways our relationships with one another and the non-human world inspire, move, reveal, and tether us in “laughter, whimsy, shame, and love,” as the Two Pansies video puts it.

Characterizing their show as a “tender archive” of “strange strangers” or emergent beings, artists Shay Donovan and Autumn Star speak of their work as an effort to help nascent forms they encounter while living and making “find their shape” and “come to be at home.” Costumed as lobsters, bees, owls, pansies, or jackalopes, they animate animal and plant stories they have “collected along the way.” Furnished with materials from their own homes and decorated with drafts of paintings found in the show, they also provide access to a domestic space or “home” for the Two Pansies in a side room of the gallery.

Across their performances, Donovan and Star centre care, humour, and fragmentary narrative as methodologies, engaging viewers in the intimate rhythms of a generous and multiple queer life. They also show how colour may function as both camouflage and highlight, offering expansive understandings of what painting is or could be and asking us to look and listen more closely to making and the living world as sources of new queer imaginings.

Full disclosure: As a director of the NSCAD MFA program during part of the time both Donovan and Star were enrolled, I know them well and visited their studios while they were developing this work. I met them in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in late November 2025 to discuss critical aspects of the exhibition.

KARIN COPE: Let’s talk about your title. It nods toward queer histories and iconographies, including the etymological history of the pansy, from its fifteenth-century roots in the French pensée to its early twentieth-century use as a term meaning “effeminate.” How did you find your title, and which came first, the characters or the title?

SHAY DONOVAN: The name for the show came first. Alongside the rich etymological history of the word, we really enjoyed reclaiming the word “pansy” from its modern usage and transforming it into these pansy characters. Because why can’t a being be effeminate and delicate but also powerful and formidable?

KC: Some of the work appears side by side, while other elements, like the film, the Birdfish sculpture, and the Pansies’ “home,” feel fully collaborative. How did your collaboration begin, and how is working together different from working alone? 

AUTUMN STAR: Shay and I have been close in proximity in our creative spaces for a few years now, so working together was a natural evolution. We met during our time in the MFA at NSCAD, where we were assigned studios next to each other. Early on, while I was making a giant snail sculpture, we learned that we both have a shared enthusiasm for bugs. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes light up as much as Shay’s did while talking about cicadas, so we co-curated a group show called Swarm, all about the insights of insects. Two Pansies was another chance to combine some of our headspace to create things that I doubt either of us would have manifested alone.

KC: What is the role of the house, or “pansy safe space,” in relation to the film? You’ve described the show as a “tender archive.” How does the house function as a space of intimacy and care?

AS: The installation for the Pansies’ home functions as an invitation to enter a strange habitat and helped us explore tensions between interior and exterior in queer space. What is shown? What is concealed? I wonder about the fragility of queer archives and efforts at preservation. If you wanted to preserve a pansy for display, you would have to press it in glass, but that estranges its velvety textures and puts them at risk of shattering. A more private option might be pressing the flower between the pages of a book, but then who else gets to see it? The living room and the film are a living archive of the Two Pansies in this moment, filled with art, love, joy, and a gigantic Birdfish.

KC: There is great physicality in this work, from the human and more-than-human scale of the pieces to the gestural marks they record, the precarious balance of the sculptures, and the whole-body performances in the film. You also posit a merging of bodies, species, and genders, visible in the snail sculptures, the Birdfish, and the animal and plant characters in the film, as well as in the melding of plant, animal, mineral, and human forms in your paintings. Can you talk about the vision of the world these interlacings propose, why it matters to see the world, as Emily Dickinson would have it, “slant,” and what kinds of ecological care shape this work in terms of themes and materials?

AS: Using the whole body to create a piece as big or slightly larger than life takes a lot of endurance; we want that energy to bleed into the work. As for the merging of plants, animals, and spirited bodies, these conjoined hybrids show that it takes repeated hovering around the edge of something to get to know it and to see just how circular our connections to life are. And of course, as to materials, we’re recycling all the time! 

SD: I love the space between the slants, the little crevices we can carve out to make room for identity that isn’t one thing or the other. In the film, I moved from depicting entities through painting to embodying them on camera. I had to give myself permission to inhabit the character rather than act as a witness.

KC: Talk to me about colour and materials. Do they build worlds? You’ve described your process as helping these emergences find their shape. Is this queer birth?

AS: Colour is a guiding companion for me. It can be patient when figuring out a composition or rowdy and certain about where the eye should travel. Colours rubbing against each other create visual conversations. I feel like Shay and I have distinct palettes that speak a similar language with different accents.

SD: There comes a time when the material takes over and I’m no longer the conductor but a conduit. If I don’t let that switch happen, the piece feels unresolved. Colour in my paintings is mostly intuitive. Sometimes it comes from memory, but it helps build the world of the work. I imagine what’s happening out of frame as a continuation of what’s visible. Is that a queer birth? Maybe.

KC: In the video, you describe shared affects as “laughter, whimsy, shame, and love.” Why does this particular assemblage matter?

SD: Whimsy often gets mischaracterized as frivolous, but it can be a huge source of joy. We didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously, and letting whimsy guide some decisions left room to breathe and have fun. Laughter and whimsy feel internal, while shame and love are often projected from outside. Together, they feel like a common queer experience.

KC: How do you begin a project? How do you know you’re onto something?

AS: Sometimes a piece you think is legless ends up with three legs and six arms. Other times you think something is sturdy and it turns into a fish with wings. We tend to let our hands do the heavy lifting and let the concept follow. Embracing fluidity is important.

SD: It’s hard to tell when something starts walking on its own. Sometimes I don’t know until it’s already out the door and teaching me something.

For example, we’ve been asked a lot about the collaborative Birdfish. It was my first time working on a sculpture that large and alongside someone else. It was inspired by watching ospreys near Lunenburg catch fish. The way they carry fish, held forward and parallel to their bodies, looks almost as if the fish has wings. In a last embrace, the fish is thrust into a different realm. I wonder how they experience that brief hybridity and what it would look like for the fish to have control over that journey.

KC: What have you learned from working together? Would you do it again? What’s next?

SD & AS: This is just a start. We fuel each other with our ambition. It’s exciting to work alongside someone who shares the feeling that there is more to explore. There will be collaborations in our future, and this isn’t the last you’ll see of the Two Pansies.