On the TREX wall in Grande Prairie

Boreal Harvest, 2026. Media: paper, ink, found objects

To cap the SNAP/ TREX residency of 2025 (start at the beginning here), I had been invited to show my work on the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie TREX wall from April-June 2026. So! Exciting!

Getting everything ready meant printing the remaining seven linocut blocks and screen printing all 28 community members. These are friends and family who I’ve any of picked fruit, cooked, or shared recipes with. To these screen printed portraits, I attached canning jar lids. Then, I strung them on fishing line and attached them to semicircular tubing that surrounds the linocuts. Of those, I used a chine collé/ tapioca paste technique learned from Evan Robinson and honed by Sean Caulfield’s helpful write up.

On the ground are wooden crates holding canning jars labelled with letterpress-printed idioms from the kitchen that are equally applicable to community work, like “things are reaching the boiling point” and “we’re in a jam.”

Further along the wall are working documents, like uncut paper used in screen printed portraits and early drawings of the linocut printed pots.

I chose jam making for this piece as it’s something that I do. I learned from my mom and she learned from her mom. My grandma left the big city and moved to the farm, learning from neighbours how to “put up” food. I know that the grandmother I never met fed eight kids this way, and don’t know how she learned: probably from family or friends.

In the midst of politics and economics and greed (which seem particularly awful right now, but have always often been. . . awful) it makes sense that we share the skill of canning and other knowledges like it. The community holds the knowing, and by participating, we feed each other. This is the Boreal Harvest.