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.

Gut Feeling showcases a roster of artists who, in Halifax, are nothing short of beloved. Even on a snowy night in a busy week of exhibition openings, Dalhousie Art Gallery was packed with friends and community members who are deeply devoted to the artists featured. Many artists have practices that intersect with their roles as community organizers and activists, such as Elise Boudreau Graham who co-runs Friends and Neighbours Gallery in a Montréal apartment and Shaya Ishaq who is a co-creator of Black Lit and, as an individual artist, creates libraries of Black literature. The atmosphere at the opening was palpable, supportive, and high-energy. The exhibition’s online description spoke of gut biomes and bacterial interactions between bodies that exchange, collaborate, and change one another. It promised a curatorial paradigm that put communal artistic practice under the microscope to examine how it is intuitive, innate, or embodied on a cellular level. By contrast, the exhibition description on the gallery wall seemed like an apology for not meeting this vision, or an attempt at curatorial modesty. The new description read:

There is no ‘theme’ in this exhibition linking the artists or works together. Instead we chose to work with artists we felt would respond well to our vague notion of a group exhibition and access the Gallery and its resources. In the development of our process, we noted that we were working intuitively, from our gut: / Gut biome, more bacteria than body; if we touch, our biomes change. Biomes exchange, collaborate, and change one another, intuiting needs through intricate communication.

At the opening and the artist talk, there was no mention of gut biomes, and by writing about their own framework as “vague,” Glanzmann and Johnston undersold the nuanced connections that developed naturally between the works. The overwhelming community support for this exhibition shows that the curators should not have lost faith in their original vision. Some artists who may have been considered “emerging” when the exhibition was proposed have, by my standards, surpassed that category today. Perhaps by some curators’ standards these artists— many nationally-exhibiting, and one longlisted for the Sobey Art Award—could fall into this inflated label. Dobbin called into question this category which framed the exhibition by presenting a “retrospective” of their own work created at age eleven. Dobbin’s tongue-in-cheek response to the exhibition exposed what many of us were thinking: that the slow turnaround of exhibitions in major art galleries cannot possibly keep its finger on the pulse of emergent practices. While group exhibitions have the potential to launch the careers of emerging artists, they can also expose the systems that hold them back.

Several artists responded to the architectural and institutional structure of their surroundings in Dalhousie Art Gallery, including Lou Sheppard, who mapped every path that one could take in the building without a key. Elise Boudreau Graham created an installation that celebrated her father Russel Graham, who worked as an electrician at Dalhousie. By painting a line where the electrical conduit runs between two outlets, Boudreau Graham highlighted the technical labour of her NSCAD-trained father in the space of the gallery. Emily Davison and Elyse Moir replayed the script of a past artwork by renowned conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, which is housed in Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection. In 1984, Ferguson hired an assistant to create landscape paintings based on Nova Scotia postcards, and the resulting work was mainly accredited to Ferguson. In response, Davison hired Moir to produce 60 postcards (which doubled as time cards to clock in and out of work) based on the four original paintings. It’s as though Moir played broken telephone, by reinterpreting the four repeated images over the course of her shifts as a contracted worker. Scribbled on one of Moir’s sketches it read, “I hadn’t been thinking of the pedagogical implications of the Assistant / Artist relationship.” Davison and Moir jointly share credit, copyright, and future exhibition fees for the work, calling into question the systems of apprenticeship that have traditionally defined emerging artists.

Stephanie Yee’s sweet and sour sauce fountain created a sticky aroma at the entrance of the gallery. Using this common motif found in many Chinese North American restaurants, Yee used the water feature to expose the racial prejudice behind the concept of tackiness and to interrogate the dual meaning of the word taste. In José Andrés Mora’s motorized installation, a screen loudly swung back and forth along a structural beam, displaying a statement in all-caps that was reminiscent of a scrolling news ticker. With each pendulum swing, the message on the screen reflected the movement as though to say “this, but also this, but also this.” The narrative arc of the text waffled with indecision as it scrolled back and forth, forgiving, congratulating, and apologizing to an anonymous reader.

Several artists took intuitive approaches to making, appropriately following the logic of the exhibition’s title. Lou Sheppard’s graphic compositions translated data into dance notation and audio scores, which were then interpreted by dancers. The dancers negotiated space, testing out new postures as they tentatively explored the contours of Sheppard’s notation. Though Sheppard’s work appears to follow a rigid, linear process of translation, it frays the hard disciplinary seams of traditional research by operating in an exploratory manner. Adjacent to Sheppard’s work, the walls around Ishaq’s weavings were plastered with an Octavia E. Butler quote from Parable of the Sower, “ALL THAT YOU TOUCH / YOU CHANGE / ALL THAT YOU CHANGE / CHANGES YOU / THE ONLY LASTING TRUTH IS CHANGE / GOD IS CHANGE.” Ishaq followed Butler’s tenants of change while weaving, shifting techniques each time that a consistent pattern emerged in her fibre works. While the resulting weavings follow winding narrative paths, they are far more balanced than they are spontaneous. The meticulous bands of colour often mirror one another, and Ishaq demonstrates the regularity of change as a consistent inevitability.

The tenuous relationships between the works in the show demonstrate that the curators had the right instincts when drawing together these artists. They certainly followed a clear methodology by relinquishing curatorial authority in order to offer agency to artists with communally-driven practices. Granted, their modesty bordered on self-deprecation, as though it was meant to shield them from criticism. In the past, I have heard Atlantic-based curators talk about a sense of inferiority that follows east coast artists, one that stops them from valuing their own statements, stories, and testimonies. It takes gall to draw a circle around a group of artists, claim a truth about them, and expose them to the eye of the critic. Though this risk of exposure can come at a price for a curator, the calibre of the work in this exhibition deserves and demands such a risk.

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists. The group exhibition, shown at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, featured the work of Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz, denirée isabel, Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, Alejandro Rizzo, Cecilia Salcedo, and Camila Salcedo. The exhibition served as a platform for Venezuelan artists to document, archive, and
recreate their experiences of living with unfixed diasporic identities, understanding the resulting artworks as extensions of their displaced selves.

denirée isabel confronts the audience with the private-home in a los extraños que amo profundamente where the artist presents a love letter to people she has never met. Meanwhile, in Realidades Fabricadas, Alejandro Rizzo Nervo makes an interpretation of the public-home as a concern for an uncertain future that incorporates a personal recollection of events. And finally, how Camila Salcedo’s Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) encompasses both aspects, private-home/public-home, by piecing together the places from her childhood using Google Street View, a service banned by the Venezuelan government.

The multiplicitous self, which is constantly negotiating their multiple social locations, applies homestactics to their relationship with the public-home and the private-home. The public-home is a way to refer to the public spaces and events in the homeland and can be framed by what the curator refers to as “News/Crisis” in the curatorial statement: there is a scarcity of news coming from Venezuela as a result of censorship laws and power outages, which creates a barrier between the artists and their home country. However, the private-home, as a counterpart, is the collection of family pictures and stories that the artist kept after migrating. This concept of private-home can be found in what the curator categorizes as grandparents/family histories, which focuses on family memories and intergenerational trauma.

a los extraños que amo profundamente by denirée isabel is composed of multiple textile pieces that were placed inside the gallery’s window display. The weavings were hung from the ceiling, juxtaposing delicate panels reminiscent of windows and large-scale portraits of the artist’s grandparents who, unlike the artist, still live in Venezuela. This self-mapping locates the artist embedded in the specific history of Venezuela’s immigration crisis, a history where sometimes leaving the homeland means never returning. The work seems to be a place of offering, a make-believe altar that appeals to the viewer’s sense of grief. Praxis is evident in the private-home when a part of the artist’s personal archive is longing for something familiar.

Alejandro Rizzo Nervo presents us with two photographs from the series Realidades Fabricadas. The scale of the images used in the photo collages lends a cartoonish quality to both pieces while also maintaining a serious political tone. One of the photos shows three people printing money. Bills are stacked on the floor and current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro can be seen on a nearby screen giving directions. The second image shows four protesters in the foreground (holding banners, throwing tear gas, displaying the Venezuelan flag), while a group of policemen can be seen behind them next to a billboard of Chavez’s eyes covering what appears to be a slum. The use of such cartoonish composition of images can be understood as a tactic to soften the seriousness of hardship, making it manageable for an inexperienced audience. The public-home appears in this work as a criticism to the process of inflation and its consequences.

Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) by Camila Salcedo gives the feeling of scouring endlessly for a memory you cannot find. Salcedo pairs found footage, satellite photos, and images from Google 360° to create a video collage that attempts to piece together the neighborhood she grew up in. Looking for the private-home in an inaccessible public-home is a way in which the multiplicitous self-negotiates its diasporic state. In this way, it can find its reflection in location, while longing for places that have changed and maybe don’t exist anymore.

As is stated by the title, the exhibition showcases not just the work of artists but specifically that of Venezuelan diaspora artists. The curator claims that “the work intends to be non-partisan, without siding with any specific political party or political affiliation in the context of current Venezuelan politics.” For a show that presents highly political work, it seems contradictory to claim impartiality. The show falls in the trap of being in a barred room—it wants to create a sense of community by claiming impartiality, although it risks excluding other Venezuelan people that cannot remain impartial. Even when the themes are divided into categories (grandparents, family histories, news/crisis), the most evident one is overlooked: the politics. Hometactics pushes the artist to make this work to negotiate their state of living between worlds; it also unexpectedly reminds us that, sometimes, home has an inextricable link to the political.

I expected to cross a number of hurdles during the fourteen weeks I spent hiding my pregnancy from the art world. For instance, I put little pieces of cut-up lime on the rim of tumblers of ginger ale at openings. I vomited in the Cineplex lobby seconds before re-applying my lipstick and introducing filmmakers at the Atlantic International Film Festival. I found creative new ways to wear office basics to hide my growing belly. However, I had not prepared myself for how it would feel to sit on committees, boards, and juries while taking a private tally of how many times I heard I’m not sure, she has a kid now. I don’t think she has time. I tried my best to subtly defend the artists I saw as my future community, but the idea had already planted itself in my brain: was I about to be completely discounted as a professional?

During the nine months of my pregnancy, I programmed for three film festivals, curated the Nocturne Art at Night Festival, and became the Executive Director of the Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT), an artist-run centre. My career was in a strong place, but with every passing We will miss you!, I felt as though the invite to my retirement party would show up any day.

Years ago, when I was an art student at NSCAD University, a female professor told the class they loved their son, but parenthood is the reason they wouldn’t become a great artist. I had never encountered that perspective and I thought perhaps it was a belief particular to that artist alone. In the past few months, however, I have heard that same sentiment from female- identifying artists and arts administrators on the street, in meetings, and through unsolicited Instagram messages. I can only assume these are meant to be loving attempts to drastically lower my expectations.

When I became pregnant, CFAT’s personnel policy read:
CFAT recognizes patriarchal systems in which many arts organizations in Canada operate.CFAT acknowledges the existence of internalized misogyny, white supremacy, neo-colonialism, rape culture, and systemic gendered pressures based on normalized patriarchal gender roles and as normalized societal framework.

A few paragraphs later, the policy laid out CFAT’s allowance for parental leave: a full 20 weeks shorter than what the provincial law protects.

At the time, I sat on boards for both the Artist Run Centre Association of Canada and the Independent Media Arts Alliance of Canada, and I was hearing similar language everywhere about the importance of removing patriarchal systems through policy work. I thought this meant that CFAT had fallen behind the times. I reached out to organizations locally and nationally who spoke loudly about such issues only to find out that, just like CFAT’s own policies, there were no real protections for their employees as parents. In an informal survey of the artist run centres and galleries in the HRM, I found only one financial top-up policy in place at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Very few institutions had any parental leave or pregnancy leave policies at all.

I asked employees if they knew of anyone who had taken time off to care for a newborn in the past decade or so. I found a handful of men who only took a few weeks, but no women, and no folks who had birthed their babies. I knew that if I was going to be able to come back to my job after physically recovering and spending time with my newborn, I’d have to quickly become my own advocate.

The first change was to make myself a real employee. (For years CFAT’s staff had been contract workers whose contracts were renewed yearly.) Although I held a full-time position for five years, under the eyes of the government CFAT was neither obligated to hold a position for me upon completion of my leave, nor was I eligible for federal maternity leave benefits. While this was a fixable problem for me, much of our sector leaves workers jumping from contract to contract with no financial stability with which to plan a family.

Next, I took a long shot and proposed to CFAT’s board of directors that they adopt a parental leave top-up policy. It often comes as a surprise to those who have never looked into it that federal pregnancy and parental leave only covers 55% of your income for the time you are off work (35% should you choose to take the extended leave). Arts administration is a field where incomes are low nationally and, with Atlantic Canada lagging behind the rest of the country, 35 – 55% of your income can be completely unlivable. It’s also worth mentioning that an arts career is unlikely to allow a large savings account.

Through the process of policy building, I became a self-taught expert on parenthood and employment law in Nova Scotia.

As I sat in a prenatal yoga class with two dozen other pregnant people, I listened to them swap plans of how close to their due dates they would work. When I asked about their experiences applying for maternity benefits and navigating work policies, the lawyers, grocery store clerks, teachers, and others looked confused. One expectant parent asked: Don’t you just tell HR you’re leaving?

Advocating for yourself is not easy, particularly when you feel that your job may be at stake. At one film screening I attended in my first trimester, a local male programmer whispered to me that the filmmaker was coming in, and appeared to be pregnant. The warning felt as if I was supposed to adjust my conduct around her accordingly, and I was left unsure how to do so. As I prepared to present my policy requests to the board, that man’s voice replayed in my head. What if rather than considering my request, they simply refiled me into a category of employee who was no longer useful?

I’d be a mother without an income, and an arts worker without a career.

I lucked out in a big way. The personnel committee was made up of three women who worked in arts administration, one of whom is a mother. They worked swiftly and seriously and treated me with such professionalism that it wasn’t until one too few beer glasses were handed out at the board table that I realized they were onto me. This group of women understood that cohesive policies and actions make change, not statements of moral intent.

Pregnancy is a vulnerable time: your body changes in ways no one warns you about; every horror story that ever took place in a delivery room seems to find its way to you; and every small medical complication can leave you wondering if you caused it by eating deli meat. More than anything, pregnancy is lonely. Even with the most supportive of partners, it’s you alone who will take on the exhaustion, guilt, excitement, and pressure of growing an entire human being (or more) in less than a year. It seems unrealistic and cruel that we would require our pregnant coworkers and artists to defend their careers at the same time. It is essential that organizations reform their outdated or non-existent policies to create concrete pathways for arts workers to family planning.

As I write this, on leave from my job and with the birth of my son weeks away, I feel grateful for the work of my board that has allowed me to enter motherhood with financial and career security. Creating more welcoming environments for our expectant and new parents in art spaces and work places is not only possible but vital to the ongoing process of aligning our institutions with the cultural values we promote.