Roy L Hales/ COrtes Currents - The Thursday Afternoon Art Collective will be coming to the walls of the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery at 6 PM on Friday June 9. The artwork of LIsa Gibbons, Madhurima Braaten, Dayna Davis, Caz Ratcliffe, Denise Drury, Jane Newman, Karen McDairmid and Darshan Stevens will remain on display until Sunday June 18.
Lisa Gibbons explained, “I've been doing art classes in the studio for the last maybe 10 years. Mixed media art classes for different members of the community, children, adults, and a core group of really dedicated people just kept coming and emerged as this vital core group that we have right now.”
“We were meeting just before the pandemic, but it was still in the form of a class. Then we had to take this break and, for me personally, I also had to take a break for health reasons. The studio was dormant. We were all in our own creative spaces at home. Gratefully, I was able to come back to the studio late last fall, maybe November, and this core group of women that really wanted to continue came back as well. We just naturally morphed into a collaborative group because everybody's got so much experience now. So we left behind that old model that we were doing before, it's just really beautiful how it's blossomed, and we're doing things together.”
Darshan Stevens added, “I've always done different kinds of art, like writing and music, playing and photography. This is my career for quite a long time. I never really had an idea that I was going to become a visual artist, but 10 years ago when I moved here, I started coming to Lisa's classes. I just got really into it and now I really feel like doing this kind of mixed media art is a really big part of my practice creatively. I'm really grateful that I got to learn this through Lisa because Lisa's also a really close friend.
“Now I feel like this group of women that's together in this Thursday afternoon collective, that we have really started forming pretty tight bonds. There were already some really tight bonds with some of the people in the group. Three of them are already really good old friends.”
Jane and Denise and Karen all come from Banff and they're all really close friends and have long histories as artists themselves. There's something about the container of it being the same seven women every week that I find I like even better than when we started the group. So when we started the group, it was more drop in and different people came different weeks, and that was fine as well. But this, it feels very cohesive and it feels like a really great container for art making and collaboration and deeper friendship and connection now.”
Jane Newman said, “When we wrote the proposal to the Schoolhouse Gallery, we had to articulate what between Heaven and Earth was going to be about and also really in some ways articulate what our purpose in working together is, and what it does for us as a group. We talked about it before it became a statement, but that statement will be part of the ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ exhibit. just who we are collectively, what we believe or what we come to know collectively and it will continue to change and morph.