Visual Arts Nova Scotia is pleased to officially announce the participants of this year’s Mentorship Program. After receiving many great applications, the program will be supporting four dedicated emerging artists in Nova Scotia. Solmaz Asheri, Elise Campbell, Jools Annie (Julia Hutt), and Adam McNamara and have been individually paired with established artists and mentors François Gaudet, Barbara Lounder, Jessica Winton, and Andrew Maize.

EMERGING ARTISTS

Solmaz Asheri is an emerging visual artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Originally from Turkmenistan, a former USSR, she moved to Canada with her family as refugees in 2005, and they have been living here ever since. She graduated as a valedictorian from NSCAD University with a BFA in Fine Art and a BA in Art History in 2017. She is of Russian-Korean and Iranian-Turkmen heritage, and speaks both Russian and English.

Her work deals primarily with dreams, memory, and the intricate connection between image and text. She is interested in figuring out how poetry can capture an image, and how an image can capture poetry. Working with mediums such as acrylics, watercolour, pastel, graphite and collage, and drawing inspiration from her cultural background and childhood memories, she creates large scale paintings and drawings to try to depict and decipher the mystery of the natural world.

Elise Campbell is a multimedia artist based in Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia. Working primarily with wool, silk, and other natural fibres, she creates sculptural pieces that push traditional craft boundaries and the limits of wool as a medium by exploring human-nature relationships through textural forms, histories, and surface design. Utilising both contemporary techniques such as needle felting and nuno felting alongside the traditional craft of wet felting, she creates work that reflects narratives of ecological movement, weaving in themes of environmental stewardship.

Inspired by both found specimens and botanical watercolour illustrations, Elise’s body of work is growing from fungi and algae/kelp to include historical and currently relevant ecology specimens. Elise’s dedication to elevating wool fibre to fine craft is evident in her commitment to innovation and collaboration. Her work has garnered recognition and support from prestigious institutions such as the Canada Council for the Arts, The Robert Pope Foundation, and the Denis Diderot Grant, and has been showcased in galleries across Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and Ontario. Through her creative endeavours, residencies, and an international felting study, Elise strives to both inspire and embrace innovation and collaboration, fostering a collective responsibility to protect and cherish our natural home, Earth.

Jools Annie (Julia Hutt) is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist residing in Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia. Inspired by her own experience with pregnancy, birthing and baby-raising, Jools works with both traditional and digital illustration to create anecdotal scenes that portray snapshots of early parenthood. Common themes in her work include lactation, body positivity, and birthing people’s mental and physical changes. This work aims to challenge the capitalist devaluation of child rearing work and traditionally gendered work, such as housework and feeding kids.

Jools regularly does commissioned portrait work for new parents and families. In 2019, she was the artist in residence for Wellness Within’s conference Confronting the Carceral State: Autonomy, Community, and Liberation. Since then, she has produced work with Wellness Within and Martha Paynter to raise awareness about reproductive justice in the Canadian prison system. Their most recent collaboration is Paynter’s book titled Abortion to Abolition, for which she produced 24 illustrations.

In 2022, Jools received the Media Art Scholarship at Centre for Art Tapes (in Kjipuktuk). During this program, she created an animated piece titled Today, Any Day, that offers a glimpse into the repetitive and mundane tasks of early motherhood.  Jools is currently working on a new body of work inspired by her time at home with her kids.

MENTORS

François Gaudet is a renowned multidisciplinary artist whose innovative work spans photography, painting, and screen arts. His educational journey includes studies at Université Sainte Anne in Nova Scotia, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He earned his degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where he majored in photography and minored in painting. Additionally, Gaudet completed the Applied Screen Arts Program at Nova Scotia Community College.

Gaudet’s artistic practice is characterized by his unique approach to the printed photograph, which he treats as a “canvas” for further manipulation. He transforms these photographs into complex, layered works that merge their historical context with contemporary interventions, resulting in evolving and multifaceted narratives.

Drawing deeply from his Acadian heritage, Gaudet’s art often grapples with themes of identity, religion, sexuality, and assimilation, with a recurring motif of paradise lost. These themes interconnect to explore and articulate a symbolic homeland, reflecting the intricate nature of his cultural and personal history.

Gaudet’s work has been widely exhibited across Canada, also the United States, and Europe, and is represented in numerous prominent art gallery collections. His art continues to challenge and inspire, offering profound insights into the human experience through a lens of both historical reflection and contemporary exploration.

Barbara Lounder is an artist from Nova Scotia and Professor Emerita at NSCAD University. She uses walking as a creative method; her situated works have been presented across Canada and internationally. Lounder has participated in artists’ and writing residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Open Studio Printmaking in Toronto, Kommandantenhaus in Dilsberg Germany and Jampolis Cottage (Writers Federation of Nova Scotia). She is a founding member of Hermes Gallery in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, and the collaborative research creation group Narratives in Space+Time Society. Lounder publishes and speaks on topics related to contemporary art, walking and other aspects of mobility, social activism and education.

Jessica Winton is a mother, sculptor, and collaborator who advocates for art in the public realm. Her transdisciplinary practice has led her work to a variety of outcomes – all drawn from her belief in the ability of the arts to imagine and support alternate futures. Her work is shown through gallery exhibitions, unsanctioned interventions, performance and participatory events. Her material approach has been influenced by her work in the Art Departments of the Film & TV industry and as an instructor at NSCAD university.

Andrew Maize is an interdisciplinary artist with a responsive, playful and collaborative practice. He is currently working through his pareidolia, with the wind, and the agency of indeterminacy. Maize has worked across disciplines including music, theatre, poetry, performance and visual art. He also works as an educator, curator, postal worker and tour guide. As an arts educator and facilitator, he has been involved in collaborative projects that engage the public in non-traditional spaces such as White Rabbit Arts, Common Opulence and Art in the Open.

Maize received a BFA from NSCAD University and a MFA from the University of Guelph. He is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia and the Ontario Arts Council. He was shortlisted in the RBC Painting Competition in 2015 and 2016. He is a board member of the Lunenburg School of the Arts.

Maize is a settler, living and working on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia).

Featured image details clockwise from top left: Solmaz Asheri, Portrait of Anait and Susana (detail), acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 24″, 2024; Elise Campbell, Chanterelle (edible) (detail), wool, wood, wire, crystal base 56″ x 25″ x 25″, 2022, Photo by Brandt Eisner; Jools Annie (Julia Hutt), Mom Friends (detail), digital drawing, 11″ x 14″, 2021; Adam McNamara, Hive mind, maple burl and curly maple, 2022.