Although my art is regularly exhibited in group shows, I have not had a solo show since “Sea Change: Images of Summer in the High Arctic” in 2010. Since then I have left painting behind, moving towards printmaking as my primary tactile medium. I also like working with iPhone photography, iMovie video-making, visual text and poetry, and making artist books.
Sixteen years is a long time between solo shows. This maybe in part because I am an artist who prefers making art rather than writing proposals but it is also because of the more-than-human focus my art – from “Pigs in a (Post) Modern World,” to “Soap-Poop Meets the Ottawa Water System” during Covid, followed by “In the Absence of Eels, mourning the extirpation of the American Eel from the Ottawa River, and concluding with Plot 46, my art-research project where I studied regenerative agriculture at a local farm.
Although I hope people find my work visually engaging and maybe even beautiful in its own way, my art has a purpose. I don’t make art to sell it but to tell a story. I describe myself as an eco-artist-researcher. As such I aim to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize life forms and the ecological Earth by combining creative art practices with interdisciplinary research, through which I investigate and draw attention to socio-environmental issues such as the ethics and environmental costs of food production, diversity loss, and plastics in the environment. Although informed by scholarly research, I use my imagination and creativity to help answer my research questions.
My upcoming solo show —Plot 46: Beneath and Beyond the Plot Lines is the culmination of my four-and-a-half-year art-research project where I used a 400 square foot allotment at the Maple Hill Urban Farm in Ottawa as a site of exploration of regenerative agriculture, an holistic approach to farming that enhances the soil and sequesters carbon. Curating a solo show has allowed me to assemble a more complete story. It is an opportunity for sharing my newly gained knowledge and experience about sustainable agriculture and agroecology.
It is a multidisciplinary exhibition of hand-pulled print-based, mixed-media and digital works, live installations, and artist books that explore the hidden ecological relationships underlying sustainable agriculture. This following is a photomontage of many of the pieces in the exhibition.
I am very grateful to the City of Ottawa Artist Studio Program which has given me the opportunity to assemble my work into a meaningful story and share it publicly. The venue provides space for people to look, learn, talk, read, and think about food systems, how they spend their food dollars, and even about how they tend their own lawns and gardens.
I have registered my exhibition as a Culture Days event. That led me to offering a two-day Open Gallery Sat Oct 3 and Sun Oct 4 from 1-4pm, when I will be on site to give informal tours and answer questions. After the Open Gallery, the exhibition is open to the public by appointment only. If you would like a tour and I will be happy to arrange it. Please contact the City of Ottawa Arts Programmer at cgc@ottawa.ca or the me at bethshepherddotca@gmail.com.
