Eco Feminist Art Club

We’ll discuss reciprocity and listening practices. Registrants are encouraged to bring whatever media you would like to utilize. There will be paper, paints, pencils, coloured pencils, and collage materials provided.

I will be bringing a digital interface I’ve built that translates bio electric impulses into sound. I’ll discuss digital interfacing and resonance.

Namely; I’ll be bringing my Plant Player and will be playing plants live.

The session will begin with a presentation, a reading and discussion. This will be followed with a demonstration on interfacing with organic matter, followed by open and supported art making.

Accessibility information:

There are 6 steps in the building when you enter from Cumberland and an accessible entrance with a ramp when you enter from the east parking lot. MAWA is on
the second floor and can be accessed by one flight of stairs. For folks unable to use the stairs, a freight elevator is available (call us, and we will bring you up!) The MAWA washrooms are not accessible, but if you let us know you are coming, we will make arrangements to open an accessible washroom on the ground floor.

Recommended text: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

Each monthly meeting will focus on different subjects of enquiry, engaging with environmentalism, ecology and nature-based art explorations through the lens of intersectional feminism. Areas and topics to be explored will include foraging, wildcrafting, birding, plant identification and more! Tangible skills will be shared, such as foraging, plant and wildlife identification, as well as how to utilize scientific methodologies to support your creative practice. We will create through plein air drawing/painting, zine creation, wildcrafting techniques, natural dyeing, wild fibre textile working, wood working and more.

Throughout, we will discuss Intersectional Feminist issues and topics in balance with ecological issues and concerns. We will touch upon academic and philosophic ideas. There are no required readings, but recommended books include Birding for a Better World: A Guide to Finding Joy and Community in Nature by Molly Adams and Sydney Golden Anderson, witchbody by Sabrina Scott, Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

The goal of the Eco Feminist Art Club is to help cultivate a better world, full of reverence, with the focus on art as a conduit for transformation. Join MAWA as we journey through a universe where science and art overlap, where social justice and the environment intersect, and where artmaking and interfacing with nature is encouraged. Come for one session or all four; each will be independent from the last.

Helga Jakobson (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, often working in new media, with a particular affinity for sound as medium. Her practice focusses on loss, death and ephemerality. Lately her research has centred around this sixth mass extinction that we are living in, as well as how to live on a damaged Earth and how to make tangible the almost invisible and inaudible losses that are occurring all around us.