April 2024

Kevin Sehn is an Artist from Edmonton, Alberta. His work is mostly figurative and industrial sculpture in bronze, steel, found objects and wood. He has been working on a series of life-sized magpies in various iterations for the last several years, including a public sculpture called “The Magpie’s nests” in Rossdale linear park (with collaborator Chai Duncan). Kevin is looking forward to developing some new work examining reflections of the self and the relationships of scarcity to environmental crisis, human folly and perhaps class-struggle as well as continuing a photographic series called “Event Horizon”. This series takes a dive into painting, history, tiny forgotten spaces and things, while playing with perception, time, transformation and enigmatic spaces. It includes hundreds of exciting photos of boring things to be printed on primed wood panels that have never been shown anywhere before.

May 2024

Debra engaged in a self-directed apprenticeship 1973 - 1979, attended the Vancouver School of Art 1979- 1982, and later attained her BFA from ECUAD in 2005. Maker, teacher, adjudicator, presenter, parent, volunteer, and currently president of the North-West Ceramics Foundation. Her work is exhibited, regionally, nationally, and internationally. She has attended international residencies in Hungary, Rome, Japan, and the UK.

Debra is very interested in the inherent narrative capacity of clay and in 2005 she started to write (non-fiction) about BC ceramic history, the clay artists, and their social, aesthetic, and historic contributions. For this residency she will be working on several biographies, and hopefully engaging with locally found materials - Eastend and region is famous for its clays - and she is also interested in the Indigenous use of local clays in Saskatchewan, in contrast to BC, where only wood was mastered for function and as a means of expression. She is also looking forward to experiencing the prairies! Please check out Debra’s website here : www.debrasloan.com

June 2024

Elinor Florence grew up on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan and worked as a journalist for the next thirty years, at newspapers including the Western Producer in Saskatoon, the Red Deer Advocate, the Winnipeg Sun, and the Vancouver Province. In 1996 she moved with her young family to the mountain resort of Invermere, B.C., where she spent the next eight years as a regular writer for Reader’s Digest Canada before publishing her own community newspaper, the Columbia Valley Pioneer. After leaving journalism, Elinor turned to historical fiction. Her first novel Bird’s Eye View, about a Saskatchewan farm girl who joins the air force in the Second World War and becomes an interpreter of aerial photographs, was published by Dundurn Press in 2014 and became a Globe & Mail bestseller. She appears regularly at public events where she speaks about the inspiration behind her work. She has also written a monthly blog for the past ten years, Letters From Windermere. Elinor is now working on her third novel, about women homesteaders in Western Canada. You may sign up for her blog and read more about her books at www.elinorflorence.com.