Eco Feminist Art Club

September Meeting Agenda:

We’ll discuss materiality, urban Nature, foraging, entanglements, and more while working with foraged materials. Registrants are encouraged to bring their own foraged items, but there will be plenty to use or integrate. You’re also encouraged to bring whatever media you would like to utilize. There will be paper, paints, pencils, coloured pencils, fibers (felt, thread, yarn,etc) and needles, textile scraps and collage materials provided.

Some practical skills in weaving, drawing and mixed media approaches will be taught, but experimentation is strongly encouraged.
The session will begin with a presentation, a reading and discussion. This will be followed with a demonstration on weaving in the round on foraged frames, followed by open and supported art making.

Recommended text: Witchbody by Sabrina Scott

About the Eco Feminist Art Club

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.