Drawn From Wood
Participating Artists
Mary-Anne Barkhouse
Mary Anne Barkhouse was born in Vancouver, British Columbia but has strong ties to both coasts as her mother is from the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl First Nation of Alert Bay, BC and her father is of German and British descent from Nova Scotia. She is a descendant of a long line of internationally recognized Northwest Coast artists that includes Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin and Charlie James. She graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States.
As a result of personal and family experience with land and water stewardship, Barkhouse’s work examines ecological concerns and intersections of culture through the use of animal imagery. Inspired by issues surrounding empire and survival, Barkhouse creates installations that evoke consideration of the self as a response to history and environment.
A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Barkhouse’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections.
Gary Blundell
Gary was born in central London, England and lived there for a few years until his family moved to Ottawa, Ontario. He was the lead singer in a psycho-billy band and later a swing band in the Ottawa area and was involved in organizing artist run center exhibitions and studio spaces in Ottawa and Toronto. He completed a BSc degree in Geotechnical Earth Sciences (now called Geological Engineering) at the University of Waterloo and became head of the research department at the Canadian Wildlife Federation in the later 1980’s and early 1990’s. The subject of his conceptual landscape painting is both deep geological time and the human connections to resource extraction. During a 2011 arts residency in Yorkshire, England, his work Bituminous Illuminations, addressed the impact of coal mining on landscape and people. This work has been widely exhibited including one installation in the Victorian coal mining buildings that are now part of the National Coal Mining Museum for England. He lives in a log cabin built in 1898 by bootleggers in a woodsy part of central Ontario, an hour north of Peterborough.
Brad Copping
Artist and glass blower Brad Copping works from his home on the edge of the Canadian Shield, near Apsley, Ontario. Part of an area becoming known as the ‘land between’, it is in this landscape that he has found both muse and foil.
His sculpture is included in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Speed Museum and the Fine Art Collection of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The Corning Museum of Glass has again acknowledged his sculpture in their annual publication, New Glass Review. This marks the seventh year his work had been so honoured. He has also received much appreciated support for the development of this work from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
His functional blown glasswork can be found in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Design Exchange, and the Claridge (Bronfman) Collection. His water glass design, ‘Forest Glass’ was selected for use at the G8 Summit in Huntsville, Ontario in 2010 and in 2011 he was commissioned by Diageo to create a Crown Royal XR bottle commemorating the Duke & Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Tour of Canada. His functional blown work was also honoured at the 2012 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition with the Best of Glass Award, the ninth time his work has garnered recognition from the TOAE.
Victoria Ward
Victoria Ward is a rural based painter and writer. In the 1990s Ward was a professional playwright in Toronto and worked with some of the most innovative companies in Canada; DNA Theatre, Crow’s Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times and Autumn Leaf Performance. She was part of a sketch comedy troupe that toured across Canada, has produced and written two one person theatre works and written a libretto for an opera. She is now primarily a painter and has had over 40 art exhibitions across Canada and the UK. Along with her partner painter Gary Blundell, Ward has created community/art projects in Cobalt, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Orillia, Minden, Norfolk County and Toronto and exhibited at most regional galleries in Ontario. Ward’s work is in private collections in Canada, the US, India and Ireland.