Visual Arts Nova Scotia is pleased to officially announce the participants of this year’s Mentorship Program. After receiving some great applications, the program will be supporting four dedicated emerging artists in Nova Scotia. Barbara Brown Conrod, Kordeena Clayton, Kristi Farrier, and Pam Juarez and have been individually paired with established artists and mentors Susan Tooke, Duane Jones, Onni Nordman, and Eryn Foster.

EMERGING ARTISTS

Barbara Brown Conrod (she/her) concentrates her artwork on painting but also has experience in printmaking, sculpture, and graphic design. After training at Ritins Studio, in Toronto, Ontario, she worked for 10 years as a Decorative/Faux Finishing painter, throughout Nova Scotia. Barbara has created and facilitated art projects within Nova Scotia elementary school classes through PAINTS and Nova Scotia Arts Smarts programs. She owned and operated a design business specializing in interpretive historical signage. She lives in Port Williams, a rural area of Annapolis Valley, and is a graduate of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, BFA and a Certificate of Computer Graphics.

She uses a variety of mediums acrylic, oil, watercolour, encaustic, charcoal, pastels, and collage. Her process varies as well; sometimes she works directly from life, other times she allows the materials to dictate how the painting develops. Brown Conrod’s ideas, influences and inspirations come from many sources, depending on the body of work she is focusing on at a particular time. Examples of her past influences include art history, current social problems (primarily those she has direct experience with), her home surroundings; including her personal belongings and the landscapes she finds herself in, and her life experiences.

Kordeena Clayton is the owner of She Nubian Liberation Art & Apparel, founder of Takin’ BLK Business Initiative Co-operative, co-founder of the Takin’ BLK Gottingen and Markets. A 7th generation descendant of the first African migrants to ever accompany Nova Scotia, a proud African Nova Scotian Queer Visual artist who focuses on the importance of representation of Black and Brown people; Inclusivity and self-embracement. Known for Unapologetically Black and Unapologetically Queer Apparel, photography, graphic and clothing design, film making and painting. Clayton states “Exploring the photograph archives at the Black Loyalist Centre during my art residency May 2022, I was very intrigued by the collection and the style of photography amongst the old photos. I came to the centre with an open mind towards creation and with very few ideas. The twelve portraits displayed in this piece were of the many that spoke and/or stood out to me each day I canvased the albums. Curious about their stories that I may not ever know, their presence and existence should not be forgotten and this is a way to keep them in memoriam.”

Kristi Farrier is a hand papermaker and textile artist. Her work explores human relationships, everyday moments, the natural world, movement, labour, and ideas of freedom and constraint. Kristi’s papers are made from plant fibres and repurposed domestic and agricultural textiles that have seemingly outlived their usefulness. Growing and processing flax for papermaking connects and grounds Kristi to the rhythm of place and seasons. In her textile practice, Kristi transforms fabric, thread, and paint and dye into dynamic abstract pieces celebrating colour and line. Kristi is a juried artist member of the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design. She works out of her creative space, Flying Finch Studio, located in Middle River, Unama’ki: Cape Breton Island.

MENTORS

Focusing on environmental issues, Susan Tooke has developed visual symbolism for life forms impacted by the elements and layered through time. While painting is the foundation of her studio work, she is also known for her work in media arts, including sound, video and animation.

Tooke’s work was selected as Beacon Projects both individually and with her collaborative team, Motion Activated (Susan Tooke, Lukas Pearse and Véronique MacKenzie ) for Halifax’s Nocturne 2015. Using projection mapping, images, live drawing and dance were projected onto the Halifax Grain Elevators. In 2016, her Beacon collaboration with Lukas Pearse and Daniel O’Neill, Wild at Heart, was projection mapped on City Hall. Once again, her work was featured at Nocturne 2017, with Depths of Sorrow, a multimedia work by Motion Activated.

A celebrated illustrator, her artwork for children’s literature has resulted in multiple awards including four Lillian Shepherd Memorial Awards for Excellence in Illustration and ten published books.

Susan Tooke received the prestigious Established Artist Recognition Award in 2015 in acknowledgement of her artistic contribution to the province of Nova Scotia.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University with further studies in the Master’s of Media Arts program at the New School in New York City. 

Vere “Duane” Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in Kjipuktuk. Duane completed Bermuda College with an Associates Degree in 2000, earned an Undergraduate Degree (With Honours) from NSCADU in 2004 and graduated with a Master’s Degree from Dalhousie University in 2014. Duane was named one of the most inspiring immigrants in the Maritimes in 2021 by My East Coast Experience and Duane’s Art Pays Me clothing brand was selected as a finalist in the 2023 Halifax Business Awards. Duane is Co-Chair of NSCADU’s Envisioning Our Future Committee and is a new member of the Canadian Art Foundation Board.

His conceptual practice consists of painting, podcasting and design. Informed by popular culture and the way race, gender and sex intersect, his work is an outpouring of self-reflection, skepticism and discomfort. The medium Duane uses is typically determined by the concept and intended environment the work will exist in. His paintings are often semi-abstract – leaving room for audience interpretation in a way that sits in stark contrast with his often-minimalist and direct graphic and fashion pieces. Duane’s work holds a mirror up to the viewer and dares them to take the same journey of self-reflection that he’s on.

Onni Nordman is a painter, video maker, sculptor, and multi-media artist based in Unama’ki/ Cape Breton. He attended NSCAD first during one of the school’s early wonder years 1971-1972. Since then he has exhibited in Canada, the USA, Germany, and Finland. In early 2020, he was artist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, at the very time that the scientists there were first learning about the novel coronavirus. The months leading to the first country-wide lockdowns, when he was forced to leave Germany, were a study in living history at one of the centres of virus study. The work he made while there and subsequently can be seen at https://munichproject.blogspot.com/.

Nordman states, “For me art’s first relevance is its heuristic value— I always want the work to be a little smarter than the artist. To invent and construct ideas in concrete form is also a way of constructing one’s self. The promise of a lifetime’s labour is the hope of a ‘late style’: that is, an unprecedented, personal voice. Titian, in his late paintings, used as little paint as is humanly possible to conjure a felt reality. Beethoven, in his last piano sonata, No.32, Op. 111, effectively anticipates boogie-woogie jazz in 1822. At some point in an artist’s life, perhaps one has prepared oneself by giving to art, in the form of work and thought, sufficiently that one can now take from art ideas and forms which are beyond one’s grasp.”

Eryn Foster is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. She also works as a curator, filmmaker, educator, arts administrator and consultant. Her work has previously been shown in artist-run centres, galleries, museums, and various off-site locations across Canada and beyond. She has participated in several artist residencies such as ones at the Banff Centre (Alberta), the Macdowell Colony (New Hampshire),  Cite des Arts (Paris) and Artscape Gibralter Point (Toronto). Foster has previously also been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently, a research & creation grant from the Canada Council in support of her ongoing art/science project A Proposition of Organisms. At present she works out of her studio in The Blue Building (2482 Maynard St, Halifax) and is a proud tenant of the Wonder’neath Art Society.

Featured image details clockwise from top left: Barbara Brown Conrod, Relaxing with Matisse (detail), 1996, Oil on Board, 55″ x 39″. Pam Juarez, El Patiecito de Atrás (detail), 2022, Woven linen thread dyed and printed with reactive dyes, thiox paste and silk screen printing ink. 2 panels: 35″ x 13’each. Kristi Farrier, Flax in Flax Form #2 (detail), 2022, 11.5” x 8” x 3”. Kordeena Clayton, Ancestors (detail), Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 17cm.