This summer we played, made masks, explored and filmed with many families in the area on a new art project. I was truly inspired by the cool, lush and always changing forest and our interactions in it. I am just finishing up 11 new paintings based on these experiences.
This should be an interesting artist talk with excerpts from her compositions in the newly established (but unfinished) art centre in Powell River. The following day will be immersion in the environment with a sound walk and workshop. Thanks to Claudia, Donna and Karen for helping with the event as well as support from the arts organizations. Listen to Hildegard on CBC’s Ideas 
Caitlin Ffrench is a textile artist working in East Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish Territories). She regularly teaches workshops in different applications of textile arts and natural dyes, is a knitwear designer, and tries to spend as much time as she can outside.
Caitlin received a BFA from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) and she attended the Kootenay School of the Arts for their textile program.
“I spend a lot of time running around the woods collecting things to dye with. I believe that clothing security is just as important as food security- and that we can find brilliance in even the hardest things. I make most of my own clothing (partially because of my beliefs in clothing security, and partially because i’m 6 feet tall- and finding clothes that fit is hard). I also weave, spin, felt, do surface design (screen print, eco printing), knit, crochet, dye, wildcraft, dance poorly, sing even more poorly, and ride bikes.”
Thanks to PR Arts Council, MAS, FibreSpace Ecouture Wearable Fashion Team, Academy of Music for sponsorship.
FREE ARTIST TALK is AT 7pm Friday Nov 4, MDD Studio
REMAPPING is a series of artworks based on changing the conventions that bind us. “The map” is broken down and then recreated in various modalities of sound, painting and walking.
The Walks: I treat the map as an intentional piece of history and explore these human systems through experience of place in the present day. The maps are usually found, discarded or gifted and used as a starting point for routine walks and research. From Guy Debord in the early 1950s to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff, and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with my interest in walking as an art form. The rhythms and repetition of familiar walking patterns start to “remap” existing boundaries.
The Paintings: The map is visually restructured through mixed media collage and paint built from the found environment. I attempt to make something new from the past and reorder information just as each systemized map has been created previously. The paintings become saturated with both disparate and unified visual information. Details such as birdsong, flora and fauna as well as concepts around birth, decay, growth and rejuvenation provide cyclical rhythms which predominate the work. The paintings have a perception of moving lines, shifting spaces and disappearing and emerging forms.
The Sounds: Stories and sounds are linked from place to gallery setting through audio. Field recordings and interpretive sounds, snippets of human experience are gathered from site specific locations and neighbourhood walks. The result is a heightened sensory experience; listening, looking and rethinking environments and contemplating conventional knowledge systems. The geographical, historical and cultural context of a site or object are central themes to the recordings while physical spaces become areas of exchange and exploration. Themes emerge such as presence/absence, the commons, loss and shifting perceptions. The virtual recordings also raise questions about established truths, singular narrative histories and authorship through the fabrication of new stories.
