Artists sought for community engagement initiative
Article content
The Great Art for Great Lakes is looking for local artists for the 2020 community engagement art initiative.
Artists selected will receive $5,000 to create a participatory art project to strengthen the community’s relationship with Lake Erie.
In 2019 Michael Barber, Suzanne Earls, and Holly Anderson were chosen as the Norfolk County artists for the project.
Barber, an artist from Port Dover, created a piece entitled Water Mother, which is a wood-and-resin sculpture that combines woodworking and sandblasting.
The participatory portion of Barber’s piece included completing a quiz about understanding your commitment to the lakes and creating a mark that would later be sandblasted into the wood of the sculpture.
Earls and Anderson created a project together entitled Depths & Consequences, a 2-D mosaic of a sturgeon made of recycled glass tiles, mixed with single-use plastic.
There were two parts to the participatory portion of their project.
Anderson, the creator of Cleaning up Norfolk, held cleanup days to collect plastic along the shores of Lake Erie. After the plastic was collected and cleaned Earls held workshops of Pieceful Arts to use the plastic to create fins for the sturgeon fish sculpture.
“If the quality of the final artworks from 2019 is any indication of what to expect for this year, then we are in for a real treat,” GAGL creative director Christopher McLeod said in a press release. “I look forward to meeting the community members who come out to contribute to these wonderful projects.”
The deadline for artist submissions is March 9 at midnight. Five projects will be selected.
To submit an application email chris.mcleod@waterlution.org with your community as the subject line. In the body of the email share the vision for the project, how you would make it participatory, examples of your work, and your contact information.
GAGL is sponsored by the Ontario Trillium Foundation in partnership with Haldimand County and Six Nations of the Grand River.
An information session for interested artists will be held on Feb. 27 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Port Rowan Art Gallery.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.