Silver Linings

Karen Stentaford on Process and Placehood

Karen Stentaford has a long-standing preoccupation with place, geography, and belonging. Often the nature of Stentaford’s work requires her to spend long periods of time alone, enveloped by the landscape she is photographing. In some images—particularly in her Island series—the solitude is visceral. However, this quietude is not to be coerced into an extension of...

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Brandon Hoax’s Desire for Solitude

Trickster child Brandon Hoax, son of a Stonecoat mother and Dullahan father, summarizes their work using the following visual descriptors: being alone at a party, standing in a parking garage listening to the hum of a fluorescent bulb, and staying up late waiting for you to message me. Undoubtedly, aloneness is intricately woven into Hoax’s...

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Food, Sustenance & Queerness

Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread stunningly explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, as it reconciles queerness with faith and offers the ingredients of spirituality, family ties, and intergenerational trauma to create a debut novel like no other. Born in Nigeria, Ekwuyasi moved to Halifax for graduate school, but writing has always been...

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Drawing Motherhood’s Realities

Postpartum, Breastfeeding, & Childrearing

I met visual artist Julia Hutt on the children’s floor of the Alderney Gate Public Library just before the second wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in Fall 2020. It was eerily quiet. All of the toys and board books had been removed, and the library’s programming was cancelled. I brought my seven-month-old son with me, who...

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Sustenance

A Call to Action

By Carrie Allison Sustenance for our bodies, lands, and spirits are inherently interconnected in Indigenous teachings, language, ceremony, art, and contemporary ways of being. Sustenance is often cyclical and reciprocal; it asks for nothing but trusts that we won’t take too much. It is through creating that I gain sustenance, through my work as an...

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Barbara Pratt: Cake

"I realized that, for the first time, there would be no cake. It was a hard day. It made me realize that baking a cake was, for my mother, an act of love."

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Reaching Backward, Projecting Us Forward: My Cousin’s Cousin

Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of...

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Call for Submissions: Solitude

An issue that looks at solitude—the quality or state of being alone or remote from society—through the lens of art and artistic practices in Mi’kma’ki, and how as a community of artists we continue to grow and move forward through creation in the context of isolation. It might be the solitude we sometimes undertake for...

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Weaponizing Precarity

An Interview With RM Vaughan

We were saddened to learn of RM Vaughan’s passing in October 2020. He was an author, playwright and artist, and beloved member of the LGBTQ2S+ community. We are grateful for his legacy and his tireless contributions to the arts in Atlantic Canada and beyond. The following piece appeared in the Labour issue of Visual Arts...

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Melissa Tremblett’s Reprise

Tremblett’s Reprise is deeply personal, as it weaves text, photography, beadwork, natural found materials, and textiles to connective tissues of ancestry. This illustrates the artist reconnecting to lost histories and refining her relationship to her identity and Innu heritage. It’s both powerful and vulnerable.

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