Press

A Canmore woman has spent the summer at The Corridor Collective, exploring identity and pushing her artistic boundaries.

Katharine Ferns is one of three artists who will be showing her work at a one-day art show Saturday, Aug. 28 — Corridor Collective: Katharine Ferns, Sarah Holmes and Denise Scammell.

Ferns will show the results of her efforts over the past two months, nine oil-and-acrylic on canvas pieces. The work is a departure for the woman, who, after pursuing art for years after finishing high school in Canmore, will head to Vancouver Monday to finish her third and fourth years at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on Granville Island.

“It’s good to be in that community where teachers say, ‘No, you’ve got to do this,’” she said. “Before I think my work was really tight and I was really ‘precious’ with what I was doing.

“I had this really distinct vision and so being pushed out of that I’m able to be more free.”

“I think a lot of artists get really precious at the beginning of their practice,” she said. “You want everything to work out and you want it to be a certain way and you have to let go of that and see what happens.”

This summer she said she had wanted to push herself and she said she has created a series that has gone beyond what she’s done before.

“This was a big experiment, I’ve never, kind of, ‘blown up’ the figure that way,” Ferns said.

Ferns has painted fragmented ethereal figures in oil on an acrylic base, a move that will help her as her studies become more self-directed and a furthering in her artistic exploration of the notion of identity.

“A lot of it is about your unconscious,” she said of her fragmented, dreamlike figures. “I’m exploring how your memory, or your mis-remembering, of the past influences who you are and creates your identity,” Ferns said. “And it’s all our past experiences: the good and the bad of your life construct who you are today. But we create that construction. It’s the story that we tell about ourselves that creates who we are.

“I think it’s also all the different roles that we play in our lives — you’re a sister, you’re a daughter, you’re a mother, you’re a wife — all these different

experiences of your life come together to create who you are. But also on the other side, I’m exploring, what if your memory is repressed or disjointed, then how do you construct who you are if parts of your past are missing?”

In Ferns’ exploration of identity, she notes that it is important to recognize both the good and bad experiences that shape who we are.

“Scars are the graffiti that imprint our bodies or our experiences, whether it’s falling off your bike or something more traumatic, that becomes part of you.”

She said that especially growing up in a small town people think that they know who you are and that people can feel restricted by others’ understanding.

Ferns was born in Toronto and moved here at 16 years old to finish high school. After graduating high school, Ferns left to work in London and Paris and she travelled, taking in as many art galleries as she could.
She returned to Canmore for a short period, before she decided to take art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Health issues prompted a return to Canmore when she began practicing and she met Sarah Holmes and started taking night classes at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.

That led to a move to Calgary before she took a step back west — closer to where her family has settled — and started her studies at Emily Carr.

“I think because I waited so long to go to art school — I took a lot of workshops, I was, sort of, building up what I wanted to do when I actually got to school,” Ferns said. “And then when you get to school you have to do all these assignments that you don’t really want to do, but you realize that they’re pushing you out of your comfort zone — which is great.”

Though she fell in love with the abstract works of Spanish painters in the 1950s while working overseas, abstract painting itself, Ferns said, she found difficult and frustrating at first, but now, the painter said, she loves it.

Ferns works out of her Kerrisdale living room in Vancouver, but said that in Canmore without the space afforded her at the Corridor Collective she wouldn’t have had the space to work this summer.

Sarah Holmes also works at the Elk Run studio and has been putting in a number of hours preparing for the show as well.

She works with recycled sterling silver and sterling silver as she moves more towards an eco-friendly line of work.

Although Ferns and Holmes work in different media, they share an artistic sensibility.

“It’s nice to be in a space that’s creative and to have someone there to bounce ideas off and to talk to,” Holmes said.

“From an artist’s viewpoint, when you meet another artist you’re going to bounce ideas of each other and whatever medium you’re going to use, you’re both going to feed off each other.”

Holmes said that while recycled silver is a little harder to find, she decided to go the extra mile. Holmes spent a couple of years to find a distributor.

Holmes has worked with different goldsmiths and attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and worked with a goldsmith on Granville Island and took classes in Seattle before returning to Canmore and the studio.

“It’s much easier to be creative here than it is in the hustling and bustling of a city, it’s great there to market myself, but I can still do that through the Internet, a website, whatever it is that I need, and having stores that carry my jewelry — it’s cool.”

Holmes works with a wide variety of stones as well that she sets in some of her pieces.

Holmes makes: earrings, rings, pendants, necklaces, bracelets, cuffs, and has started now to make money clips for men.

“My thing is: I want to enhance someone’s beauty that’s already there,” Holmes said. The idea behind her design is such that people can choose pieces now and still wear them five years later.

The one-day show at the Corridor Collective will also feature the work of Scammell: A collection of handmade, eco-friendly handbags by the Canmore designer.

The Corridor Collective studios are located above the Ammonite Factory at #204 – 106 Bow Meadows Crescent in Canmore.