Author Archives: Beth Shepherd

Imaginarium and Other Exhibitions and Announcements

Posted by Beth Shepherd

As a year-end summary, I have documented my current and upcoming art exhibitions and announcements in one blog post. I present them in chronological order.

1. An Ecology of Line 2025, Singing Apple Press, Somerset UK    Dec 9, 2025 – Mar 31, 2026

An Ecology of Line 2025 is an online group exhibition featuring selected works of interdisciplinary artists participating in the collaborative exploration of the Ecology of Line under the creative leadership of Camilla Nelson. Unbundling of lines in ecological contexts dissolves barriers between human and more-than-human organisms and elements. This is my second year working with the group. The diversity of work that we have produced is incredible. Visit the online exhibition.

I have two pieces in this year’s exhibition:

  • Beneath is a multi-layered print playing with ideas of presence, absence and trace. American eels are disappearing from former habitats. This increasing absence of presence foreshadows the growing possibility of species extinction – the presence of absence.
  • The Soil Shroud is a short video. Using clean white cotton sheets as a metaphoric backdrop, it illustrates a research project that examines the winter bioactivity of the soil at Plot 46. Pristine white cotton cloth becomes both a disturbed and a disturbing surface, and finally a shroud. Click here to watch The Soil Shroud on Youtube.
2. Soils Turn: A Field Guide to Artistic Earthly Engagements, Alexandra R. Toland and Patricia L. Watts, Eds., ecoartspace, 2025

The new ecoartspace book, Soils Turn, serves as a directory to the work of 140 soil artists, working in a variety of interdisciplinary practices. The book is published by ecoartspace with support from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and was officially launched at Zabriskie, Berlin December 6, 2025. Orders for the second printing can be placed here:

Included in Soils Turn is reference to my video-poem, The Unterwelt of Plot 46.
Plot 46 is my farm allotment where I explore the benefits of regenerative organic agriculture in nurturing the soil and sequestering carbon. Unlike conventional agriculture, which wages war on nature, I raise crops without tilling or the addition of chemicals. In this eco poetic video, I imagine living in the soil and co-mingling with myriad inhabitants of the soil food web. To evoke a sense of “soilness” without literal representation, I incorporate five experimental prints with the spoken poem to embody my “being (in the) soil.”
Click to see The Unterwelt of Plot 46 on YouTube.

3. Stories from Our Future, Group Show of the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective at the Ottawa School of Art, Orleans Gallery, January 5 – February 22, 2026

Twenty local printmakers from the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective share personal visions of what tomorrow might hold. With cautious optimism tinged with joy, these artists invite visitors to reflect on their own history and their vision of the future, knowing that today’s choices shape tomorrow.

My Story of the Future – Organic Vegan Regenerative Agriculture

I am telling the story of a future where adopting widescale organic vegan regenerative agriculture can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase food security in a warming world. I see a future with many small and medium-sized regenerative organic farms around Canadian cities, where incubator farms train immigrants and young Canadians wishing to take up agriculture as a proud profession, and together we produce sufficient, healthy, wholesome plant-based food for all.

I began Plot 46, a field-based art-research project at the Maple Hill Urban Farm in 2022. In the first year, I focused on the human perspective of the agricultural landscape, as depicted in Pastoral Landscape (State IV) – Summer, a drypoint print that is part of a series of prints depicting the pastoral landscape changing through the seasons.Next is the vegetative zone of my plot, where beans climb poles, sunflowers tower overhead, and beetles cohabit the space. This is represented in the two books included in the show.

  • Plot 46: Beans, Beetles, and the Soil Biome, an edition of three hand-bound books, represents a culmination of work undertaken in four growing seasons at Maple Hill Urban Farm. To make the book more accessible, I have created a “flip book” version on Youtube
  • DROUGHT, a set of six 4×4 inch “explosion” books, each with ten unique collagraph prints, depict what appears to be aerial views of drought-spoilt land. Climate change is likely to lead to more extreme weather, higher temperatures, and long term drought which will affect food production. For more information see the accompanying essay about drought.

Finally, I struggled to imagine life in the soil biome. With a nod to 18th Century natural history tableaus, the Soil Food Web Tableau depicts an artist’s imagined life below ground at Plot 46. The woven print strips provide the stage for the drama of the soil food web, an assemblage of collagraph and trace monotype prints with other organic and inorganic elements. To learn more about the development of this piece, click here.

4. Imaginarium, ASP Gallery (Stafford Studios), City of Ottawa Jan 20 – March 29, 2026 

Imaginarium is a group exhibition of works by Don Monet, Debra Percival, Beth Shepherd and Sarah Wayne, where memory, myth, and whimsy collide. Each work offers a doorway into a world just slightly askew from our own where imagination reshapes the everyday.

Drawing from across my printmaking career, I have selected six pieces that together create an imagined garden to brighten the walls of the Stafford Studio throughout the winter months:

  • In Stairway to Heaven (Collagraph, 2013) I imagine intelligent pigs striving for a better life on a classic garden monument.
  • In In the Garden (etching, 2015), I picture a hybrid Adam & Eve in the style of the great printmaker, Albrect Dürer.
  • In Frogs Frogs Frogs (Pochoir print, 2021), I visualize colourful frogs in a garden pond.
  • Fluorescent Bunnies (Pochoir print, 2021) is a nod to Eduardo Kac’s 2000 GFP Bunny, a transgenic living artwork named Alba. I imagine two little bunnies crouching timorously now visible in the dark.
  • Garden inukshuk (trace monotype on eco print, 2022) depicts my hand-constructed garden sculpture printed on eco paper coloured with local plant material.
  • Finally, Think Like a Dandelion (Botanical monotype print with text, 2025), completed for this show, gives voice to the ubiquitous dandelion.

If you want to join me in the garden, please email beth@bethshepherd.ca to arrange a visit.

5. Protest in Print, Connective Gallery at the Nepean Creative Arts Centre  Jan 22 – Apr 16, 2026

For the Connective Gallery’s first show in 2025 we have selected the theme of “Protest in Print.” For centuries, printmaking has been an important tool for communications and protest. Although much of my work has an element of protest, my PolitArts series that I undertook in 2018 is the most politically overt, tacking a number of difficult issues in the human and more-than-human world. I submitted two PolitArts:

  • “It’s a Crying Shame” (Screenprint with collage) laments the sad state of our beautiful blue planet with acidified and warming oceans, melting glaciers, shortages of fresh clean water, over harvesting of marine life, and plastic and chemical pollution everywhere. The crying eye is screen-printed over a photo of the Earth taken from space in 1972.
  • Blood Bunny (screenprint) reminds people that children may be harmed along the supply chain of holiday chocolate. After decades of pledging to end child labour, big chocolate makers still purchase much of their commodity cocoa from poor West African countries. These large buyers exert pressure to keep cocoa prices low, which leads to the use of cheap child labour working under dangerous conditions.

Check out the activities of Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective and the Connective Gallery here.

Interspecies Correspondence: Letter to Lonesome Goose

Posted by Beth Shepherd

The fall weather has inspired me to post this blog as a permanent reminder of, hopefully, a once-in-a-lifetime experience described in a letter I wrote to a Canada goose that overwintered in our backyard on the shore of the Ottawa River near Britannia Beach last winter (2024-25).

This letter came about as a course project. Since 2024 I have been part of an amazing international group of scholars, poets and artists led by Camilla Nelson, founder of Singing Apple Press in the UK. In her course, “Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line,” we discuss and create work in an interdisciplinary, creative-critical environment focused on the exploration of the line in its many different ecological and conceptual forms. In winter 2025 we were dealing with the theme “correspondence” when the idea for a letter to Lonesome Goose came to mind. Correspondence works on a couple of levels. First there is space-time correspondence. Then there is conceptual correspondence of meaning-making. If the goose’s life is one line and mine another, the correspondence marks the place where our lifelines intersect. On a more everyday bases, correspondence commonly refers to communication by letter, email or other messaging.

You can find the letter here.

The remainder of this blog describes how our correspondence came about, along with some photos.

The Goose Situation

On December 22nd, just before Christmas we had noticed a solitary Canada Goose in our backyard. Our property backs on the Ottawa River and with its extensive green space proves to be a very popular resting and grazing stop-over for Canada Geese on their annual migration to southern climes. The next day, the same goose remained, pecking at the frozen grass through a layer of snow. We sensed this could be a problem for a single bird left alone. In general, Canada Geese are gregarious, and injured birds are rarely abandoned. We did not want to interfere with nature but also did not want to watch this animal suffer. We contacted the Ontario Wildlife Rescue organization who redirected us to the Ottawa Valley Wild Bird Care Centre. Unfortunately, they don’t rescue stranded Canada geese but they put us in contact with a local group that did. Within a couple of hours of the initial call, we were talking to a naturalist. She asked us to get some pictures so she could assess the situation. Out back we took a video of the goose – it did not seem to be hurt as it walked away quickly as we approached but could not, or at least did not, fly away. They planned on coming out to assess the situation over the weekend.

The next day we observed a second Canada Goose with the first. She obviously had an injured wing, and we guessed she had been recovering under a large blue spruce while her mate stood guard. In the Christmas cold snap they were in grave danger of starving and freezing in the open. We got back on the phone with the wildlife folks, who told us that two birds meant a rescue would not be feasible and it was possible that they might overwinter here. We were asked if we were willing to feed the birds a healthy mix of bird seed and grain. They could survive the Ottawa temperatures if they could consume enough calories to keep warm.

In the days leading up to and following Christmas, we prepared the meal of rich food to augment the geese’s’ gleanings of frozen grass. We cleared snow and sprinkled the food in their preferred locations. We involved our neighbours who contributed food and agreed to keep pets at bay. One afternoon, we were terrified when a stray cat began stalking the injured goose. To our amazement and relief, both birds flew away! But in a few hours, they were back. This left us wondering why these birds were still in the backyard if they could fly – could our feeding them be keeping them here?

A thaw in the weather brings hope

In the last days of 2024, the weather warmed and the snow melted leaving the lawn bare. This would mean that the pair could access food on their journey south. The mate disappeared first, then the injured one. We were relieved that the birds had made it off on their belated southern journey. But on January 1rst it started to snow. With it, came one goose. Although the injured goose was clearly feeling better, the injured wing was hanging down and probably too weak for the long haul. The partner took advantage of the thaw to make a getaway. So began our daily ritual that would continue throughout the winter months.

Every day I shovelled my path through heavy snows out to the sea wall – a place the lone goose seemed to favour for a while. I made a snow fort to protect the bird against high winds whipping down the Ottawa River. Every morning, I put out seed and grain and shortly afterwards the bird arrived, often spending two or more hours eating her fill. Then she would fly off northwards towards the Deschênes Rapides and open water where she would be safe from predators.

Then things got really bad

As the weather worsened, the fort lost its appeal. The goose opted for the wind-blown grass around three large cottonwoods. So that is where I put the food. Some days the wind was so fierce I had to wear ski goggles out back. Despite this terrible weather, the goose came, ate, and hunkered down. Other animals also enjoyed the food, especially squirrels and crows.

To my horror in early March, Lonesome, under leaden skies, was attacked by three crows but she stood her ground. Then came freezing rain. She disappeared for a few days. It has been a long and lonely winter for this critter. I really hoped she was going to make it. This is when the Letter was written.

Finally, the melt started in early March. Ducks gathered in meltwater pools in the backyard. Lonesome came back. I continued to put out food to everyone’s satisfaction. I eagerly anticipated the arrival of geese, hoping Lonesome’s partner would be an early arrival.

The geese started to arrive. It was so funny when they saw me with food, they all ran towards me. Very different from Lonesome who always kept her distance.

Afterword

Unfortunately this is not a romance novel with the happy ending. We did spot Lonesome a few times on the lawn during the spring, apart in the company of other geese. As they moved off to their breeding grounds, Lonesome departed as well. We always look for that distinctive bent wing. And I hope she has had a good summer and will be able to migrate.

Note on gender

I did not know whether Lonrsome was a male or female. In my daily journal I alternated calling her “her” one day and “him” the next. For this blog post I am using she because I realized she was very small compared with incoming birds – especially the very large raucous males. As an animal advocate, we opt not to call animals “it,” to avoid objectification. I could have avoided this angst by using Robin Wall Kimmerer’s suggested “Ki” as a pronoun to avoid both “it” and human gender biases. Ki is the last syllable of Bemaadiziiaaki, the Anishinaabe word for beings of the living Earth and the first two letters of Kin, signifying that all life is our kin.*

  • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching “It”, Yes! March 30, 2015. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/30/alternative-grammar-a-new-language-of-kinship

In the Absence of Eels

Posted by Beth Shepherd

My Story of the American Eel

I never thought much about eels until 2021 when I received an Ottawa Riverkeeper appeal to save the American eel. The American eel had experienced a population decline of 99% attributed to the poorly designed hydroelectric dams that block eel movement throughout the river system, and the cumulative impacts of other factors, including over-fishing, pollution, disease, and climactic impacts throughout their range. I was shocked to learn that a keystone species was facing extinction in my own backyard. (1)

Most people don’t know much about the American eel. They may confuse it with the parasitic sea lampreys, native to the Atlantic Ocean, which are an invasive species in the Great Lakes. If they have encountered an American eel, its snake-like appearance and slimy skin can evoke biophobic feelings. In my youth, when American eels were apparently the most abundant fish in the Ottawa River watershed, I never actually saw one. I do remember uncanny sensations of a brushing on the leg while swimming in the river. Was it a weed or a stealthy eel? Talking about eels always evoked nervous giggles, shivers, and a big yuck factor!

I decided to learn more about the enigmatic American eel before they totally disappeared. Anguillids are very interesting animals. They are catadromous fish, i.e., they spend their adult lives in freshwater and migrate to the ocean to spawn and die. This is opposite to anadromous fish, such as salmon, that migrate from salt water to freshwater to spawn. The diagram shows overlapping ranges of the American eel and its sister species, the European eel, which both breed in the Sargasso Sea, far from the freshwater where eels with spend their lives.

Mature eels lay their eggs hundreds of metres deep, then die. The Leptocephalus larvae emerge and float on currents in the Atlantic Ocean. The American eel larvae head west while the European eel larvae head east for their much longer journey to Europe. After months of floating, they develop into almost transparent glass eels that then swim towards the coasts. As they approach freshwater they take on colour as they transform into the elver stage. Some immature eels will remain in brackish water. The remainder, now in the yellow eel stage, move up rivers, into lakes, streams, ponds and wetlands. Once they select a home they will remain there for a decade or more, feeding on small animals, crustaceans and insects, growing to a metre or more in length. Sexual maturity brings dramatic changes as the eel enters the silver eel stage — it is only at maturity that sexual organs differentiate. The now fully mature females head down stream on their treacherous reproductive migration back to the Sargasso Sea. Meanwhile, eels in brackish water mature into mainly males that also head to the Sargasso. Deep in the subtropical water, they meet, spawn and die.

Presence and Absence in Art and Ecology

In art, presence and absence are not opposing binaries but intertwine to create a wide range of emotions, meanings, and artistic experiences. Absence in art has many tropes, such as blank and negative space, silhouettes or ghostly shapes or lines, which convey that which is no longer present, lost, disappeared, omitted, or erased. Other tropes, such as an empty room or chair or a vacant landscape can hint at something that was present but is now absent, with possibilities that it might be present again. (2)

Absence and presence are also important in ecology. Species data is based on sampling methodologies that involve the collection of “presence” and “absence” data at a certain place at a certain moment in time. Dolly Jørgensen describes “how the presence of an absence (no known animals) became understood over time as an absence of presence (extinction) through narrative.” Analysing the histories of sitings over time eventually builds an “acceptance of presence of absence [i.e., no sitings] as a sign for absence of presence [likely extinction].” (3)

Since 2021 I have woven a story of the decline of the American eels, from abundant presence, to an absence of presence, which may foreshadow pending presence of absence – extinction. Although scientists are monitoring changes in eel population, I wonder why the disappearance of the American eel is going unnoticed, unprotested, and unmourned by Canadians. We can only detect that absence if we have awareness of presence in the first place. In most of my eel work I try to show the presence of these amazing and enigmatic animals, imagining what was/ could be rather than picturing the current absence in most of its freshwater range in Eastern Noth America.

In the Absence of eels is one of the stories that will be told in Migration Stories, an exhibition by six Ottawa-Gatineau printmakers at the Trinity Art Gallery, Shenkman Arts Centre, this summer.

My Eel Prints in the MIGRATION STORIES Exhibition

Window Eels (Installation, 2025)

Window Eels is a site-specific installation made for the Trinity Gallery Exhibiton. Large eels in shades of teal greens, blues and blacks appear to swim freely across the gallery window. These diaphanous eels float like ghosts across the window – their very presence anticipating their pending absence.

To make them, I cut four shaped plates from large existing collagraphic plates. I used both sides to print multiple copies of each onto rice paper. Once dry, the eel images were cut out. Some were pasted together while others are single layers.

All Caught Up I & II (2022)

In early 2022, I used eels as subjects for two monotype prints. All Caught Up refers to eels captured in a net or basket, which makes a striking image in black and white.

Since time immemorial, eels have been harvested on both sides of the Atlantic — their rich flesh a dietary staple. Traditional eeling survived for centuries. Commercial harvesting of glass eels and elvers, primarily for aquaculture, and fishing for yellow and silver eels continues. Although no longer popular in North American cuisine, eel is still important in Britain, other European countries, and Asia, especially Japan. Despite being controlled, rivalries between indigenous and local fishers and the involvement of international cartels and organized crime seriously threaten the survival of American eels. (4)

Making it to the Red List Triptych (2022)

Because of a sharp decline in adult eel populations, the American Eel is classified as “endangered” and the European Eel as a “critically endangered species” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Although both Canada and Ontario already recognize the American eel as “threatened” and “endangered,” respectively, no global treaties or conventions are in place to protect them. (5)

Making it to the Red List Triptych uses a single drypoint plate printed in three strong colors to portray the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species categories — “least concern” in green, “threatened” in yellow, and “endangered” in red.

Yellow Eels Diptych (2022)

The multicoloured-monotype diptych imagines abundant yellow eels moving up river at the Deschênes Rapids.

For millennia, yellow eels have made their way up river past natural rapids and waterfalls into the high reaches of the Ottawa River watershed. Since the turn of the 20th century, over 50 dams and electrical plants have been built. Not surprisingly, populations of eels have declined by 99%. Once an important source of food, medicine and leather for indigenous peoples in the watershed, this sacred animal remains only in the memories of elders. (6)


Flow: Recruitment and Escapement (2022)

Flow: Recruitment and Escapement is an 8 by 3 foot collagraphic mixed media print on Japanese Shoji paper. It depicts a multitude of young adult yellow eels making their way upstream in a process called “recruitment.” There they will remain until they reach sexual maturity often decades later. They are crossing paths with large sexually mature females, now black with silvery bellies, as they head downstream towards the ocean in a process called “escapement.” The eels are rendered at more or less their actual relative sizes.


Elegy for the Silver Eel (2022/ 2023)

“Elegy for the Silver Eel” is a visual poem typeset and framed as Concrete Poetry. I wrote the poem in 2022 after seeing photos of eels damaged and dying after passing through turbines at the Carillon Damn where the Ottawa River meets the St Lawrence.

The shaped text was hand-typeset by me using Helvetica font and printed with the Vandercook letterpress at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab in 2023. A total of 18 impressions were made.

Beneath (2025)

In the last year I have been examining the absence-presence conundrum in the form of trace – the indication of the existence or passing of something. A trace exists because something was present. The trace can signify both the absence of presence (no sitings) and the presence of absence (extinction). Eels make an ideal subject for my visual experiments.

Beneath is a six-layered collagraph in a light box playing with the ideas of presence, absence and trace. The piece comprises, from the top down, two translucent prints of surface water over three difference prints of eels, adhered to a base of white paper. The work is backlit by battery operated LED strip lights behind the prints. When the batteries fail, the eels will be only ghostly traces.


References:

(1) The American Eel. The Ottawa Riverkeeper website, https://ottawariverkeeper.ca/what-we-do-2/issues/endangered-species/the-american-eel/.

(2) Searle. Absence. Environmental Humanities 12:1 (May 2020) 167-172. DOI 10.1215/22011919-8142253 © 2020 Adam Searle.

(3) Dolly Jørgensen. Presence of absence, absence of presence, and extinction narratives. Published in Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian Perspectives on Landscapes and Peoples, L. Head, S. Saltzman, G. Setten and M. Stenseke (eds), 45-58. Routledge, 2016.

(4) Aaron Beswick. Terror, violence and organized crime: Inside the lawless East Coast fishery. National Post, May 01, 2025.

(5) Jacoby, et al. Anguilla rostrata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2017- 3.RLTS.T191108A121739077.en.

(6) Algonquins of Ontario, Returning Kichisippi Pimisi, the American Eel, to the Ottawa River Basin: Bridging the Gap between Scientific and Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge, 2012, 2-3.



My Art is Garbage

Posted by Beth Shepherd

I am very pleased that I had an article published in The Goose, the official publication of ALECC (Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada), of which I am a member. Early in 2024 the editors sent out a call for “a playful open edition” on garbage. They were talking more figuratively, but since I use so much waste plastic in my practice, I could not resist the call. After much back and forth with the editors, “My Art is Garbage” was published in February 2025. You can download it here.

In “My Art is Garbage,” I describe three recent art projects where garbage is both a theme and an artistic medium used to critique the overuse of and inability to reuse or safely dispose of everyday plastics. The first work, Untitled (Plastic Film Balls), uses non-recyclable single-use household plastic made to form an installation of shimmering balls and alludes to the environmental footprint of the artworld (Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Untitled (Plastic Film Balls

Plastic Shores, a series of monotype prints, reminds us that plastics in the environment are deleterious to species of shore birds (Figure 2). 

Figure 2: Plastic Shores series

Finally Plastic Pests, a series of mini-sculptures constructed from plastic found in agricultural soil warns that plastic is everywhere in the food production system (Figure 3).

My monoprint Plastic Shores (Canada Goose) also appears in a review by Maureen Korp in “Wayfaring storylines: Three art exhibitions” (January 2025 OSCAR, pp30-31).

Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line

Posted by Beth Shepherd

From February to July, 2024 I had the opportunity to participate in an intradisciplinary, creative-critical enquiry towards an Experimental Ecology of Line with Camilla Nelson, a PhD and founding editor of Singing Apple Press, whose work explores the materiality of language in relation to the other-than-human world.

Ecology of Line really resonated with me because I see my environmental art projects as entwined in line. While I initially thought about above-ground lines like linear perspective, the horizon, property and plot lines, I soon added notions of thready roots and tendrils of my beans, and the shapes of living and dead organic matter in the soil beneath my feet. Printmaking is also a particularly line-oriented medium.

Each month, using Tim Ingold’s taxonomy of line as a framework, the group of artists, poets, writers, scholars, and creatives explored nature though the lenses of threads, dots and blobs, traces, weaves and transcriptions. Through group discussion, sharing, and generous feedback, we each strove to produce a creative work – be it an image, poem or text, video, or other construct of some type – that encapsulated our individual creative thinking that month. In the summer each participant was invited to submitted two pieces for presentation in a group exhibition. This fall Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line was launched, curated by Camilla Nelson, and including works by Amanda Brown, Carol Dalton, Susanne Eules, Nancy Holmes, Petra Kuppers, Boya Liang, Karen Neuberg, Mary Newell, Chris Partridge, Linda Russo, Beth Shepherd, Jennifer Spector, Natalie Vestin, Tessa Waite, and Sarah Westcott.

The exhibition presents a selection of work in four groupings related to Ingold’s taxonomy of line: TRACE, THE THREAD & THE WEAVE, DOTS & BLOBS, and TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LINE. I have work in the first and the last sections. In TRACE I have my artist book series of prints called DROUGHT. In TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LINE you can view my two-minute video poem: Plot 46: The Unterwelt. Please enjoy the entire innovative collection of work.

I enjoyed this collaborative form of artmaking so much – it is like being on an international residency — that I have signed up for the ADVANCED EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF LINE, designed for “towards an experimental ecology of line” graduates.

My Special Place, the CBBAG-OV Chapter 2023-24 Annual Signature Exchange

Posted by Beth Shepherd
Swap participants picking up the signatures at the March CBBAG-OV meeting at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab

“A Special Place” is the theme for the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artist Guild, Ottawa (CBBAG-OV) 2023-24 Signature Exchange or “swap”. In the swap, each of the ten participants, prepared “signatures” – the name given to a nested group of pages in bookbinding lingo. Other than size and theme, anything goes. Each of the ten swappers received nine other signatures to be bound into a unique artist book. It is always exciting to see the results!

The Four prints included in Plot 46: Beans, Beetles, and the Soil Biome

Plot 46: Beans, Beetles, and the Soil Biome represents “my special place” and is my submission to the Swap. My four-print set of prints represents different dimensions of Plot 46, a 400 square foot allotment at Maple Hill Urban Farm in Ottawa that I have been cultivating since 2022. Plot 46 is also the eponymous name for my multi-year art-research project on regenerative vegan organic agriculture. I am documenting my project through printmaking, writing, poetry, and video. The first print in the set depicts a traditional landscape view of my plot in its first year. The second is a picture of beans, my main crop, that I harvest, dry, and eat over the winter, always saving seed for the next season. Plants capture the sun’s energy and that energy is transferred into the soil via root exudates. The exudates fuel the bounty of organisms that comprise the soil food web – the secret sauce of healthy soil. Beetles and worms represent all the visible and invisible organisms that coexist in a pesticide-free agricultural ecosystem. These four images, each 5X10 inches, were printed on fine art paper and constructed into an accordion format for the exchange.

Spine view

Other book artists contributed their own visual stories about their favourite places — from bed and bath, childhood memories, to personal retreats, in a wide range of media. Once I received the other nine signatures, I got to work making them into a book. I decided to make a Coptic book because of its historic significance. The Coptic book is an archaic form of bookbinding used by early Egyptian Christians (the Copts), originating between the 2nd and 4th century. Coptic bindings are characterized by one or more signatures sewn through their folds and attached to each other with chain stitch linkages across the spine. The advantage of Coptic binding is that the book can open flat and does not require any adhesives. I made covers for my book using hand-made paste paper over cardboard.

The contributors to the book in alphabetical order are: Valerie Bridgeman, Deidre Hierlihy, Anna McFaul, Tiffany Moore, Ruth Nuesch, Wendy Parlow, Diane Parkin, Susan Pinard, Madeleine Rousseau, and Beth Shepherd. A big thank you goes to Madeleine Rousseau and Diedre Hierlihy for coordinating this year’s swap and to all the very creative, talented, and generous people who participated. 

I wanted to share the work of my fellow artists. So to do this I made a “Flip Book.” Double click on the book to start, then click to stop and start.

The Lenticular Print: Now you see me, now you don’t!

Posted by Beth Shepherd

My 3D print Now you see me, now you don’t! is a lenticular or agamographic artwork that uses optical illusion to create changes when you look at it from a different angle. The first lenticular artwork I saw many years ago was in a surprisingly memorable medical history exhibition in a forgotten European museum. Among sculptures of cutaways of pregnant women, depictions of treatments such as bloodletting, and various scary medical instruments of the day, I remember walking back and forth in front of a large oil painting watching in amazement as the picture changed depending on my vantage point.

Figure 1 – By Jean Francois Nicéron – https://books.google.nl/books?id=r1T-rypHaRgC&pg=RA1-PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64685694

The technique of lenticular imaging first developed in the Renaissance was called tabula scalata (picture ladder) and was used for such things as double portraiture. See figure 1. The intellectuals and artists of the time were very interested in perspective. Interest in this type of optics was rekindled after the Industrial Revolution with the introduction of stereoscopes, kinescopes and other various three-dimensional and motion picture machines designed to display images and the photographs to the masses. By the early 20th century, lenticular postcards became a niche novelty at the same time motion pictures were exploding. In my childhood I remember seeing cards, key fobs, and pens with pictures of moving dancing women. Despite these rather frivolous uses, the concepts of interweaving images taken from different angles continued to fuel research in colour photography, 3D animation, holography, virtual reality, right up to today’s metaverse.

As a member of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG) I had the opportunity to step back in time and learn how to make my own lenticular artwork, transforming 2D prints into a “moving” sculptural artwork. I used two prints I had previously made – one was a linocut beetle and the other was some Chine colléed paper from a failed print. I prepared a scaffold base (Figure 2) by folding stone paper accordion style and painting it black. I then cut the two prints into strips and glued them in place on the scaffold, one set on the left side of the fold and the other print on the right side.

Figure 2 – The accordion scaffold

The resulting piece — Now you see me, now you don’t! — is 7.5 X 11.5 X .75 inches in a 9 X 20-inch shadow box frame.

Figure 3 – The mounted piece face on

Thanks to the lenticular mounting system, the beetle appears and disappears depending on the viewer’s angle as seen in the short video.This made this work a perfect submission for the exhibition “Picturing the Invisible: Sights/ Sites Unseen” held at the Nepean Creative Arts Centre in late 2023 and will be exhibited at the getting to know you exhibition at the ASP Gallery, Ottawa October 3 – November 27, 2024.

References:

“The history of Lenticular Printing – Holographic Images from the Past, Present and Future.”
YouTube, uploaded by Jared Hoffman’s Lenticular Printing Masterclass, 25 Oct 2022,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxvYGOZF7L4

“Tabula scalata.” Wikipedia, updated 11 Feb 2024,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_scalata

Little Dancer (Redux)

Posted by Beth Shepherd
Did she move? My visit to the Met March 25, 2023

In March 2023 I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and had the pleasure of seeing Edgar Degas’s The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (circa 1878-81; cast A.A. Herbrard, 1922 (Paris)). I have seen this sculpture a number of times and I am always struck by its uniqueness — the contrasting materiality of durable bronze and the fragility of the tattered tutu and silk hair ribbon. I was especially pleased this time at the attractiveness of the little dancer’s new tutu.

A few years before my last visit, Glen Peterson, conservator at the Met, had been charged with researching what dancers wore when the original sculpture was created to make the tutu more historically accurate. Peterson determined that the bouffant skirts worn by ballerinas of the day were knee-length and made of multiple layers of tarlatan, a starched open-weave cotton. He painstakingly hand-crafted the new longer tutu which was installed in 2018 (1).

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is not recognized as a sculptor but as an impressionist painter in oils and pastels. Nevertheless, he did undertake some sculpture in wax and clay of his favourite subjects: ballerinas, nudes, and horses. He exhibited La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans at the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881. Like the Impressionist paintings of his peers, Degas’s work broke many conventions of classical art of the period. Even more controversial, the sculpture was modelled in wax and wore a real bodice, stockings, shoes, a tulle skirt, and a hair wig with a satin ribbon – materials not used in fine art. Everything but the tutu and ribbon was set in wax (2). The work received much criticism and the sculpture was not shown again during Degas’s lifetime.

Upon Degas’s death in 1917, La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans and other sculptural pieces were found in his studio. His heirs authorized a series of bronze casts to be made at the Paris foundry of A. A. Hébrard et Cie. It is not certain how many copies of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans were made but they may be found in many gallery collections. The original wax sculpture is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Camille Laurens in her recent book Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, addresses the life of Degas’s subject, Marie van Goethem (1865-unknown) ― a young girl from a poor family living in Paris and training at the Paris Opera with hopes of a better life. While at the Opera, Marie was engaged to model for Degas. In late 19th century Paris it was common for young dancers and models to be subjected to sexual abuse by older male artists. Degas was known to be a celibate misogynist and therefore very unlikely to have forced himself sexually on his model; nevertheless, their relationship would have been fraught with gendered power imbalances (3).

Ballet in 19th century Paris was not the refined high-brow art form we know today. Girls as young as eight years old became ballerinas, working ten to twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week engaged in strenuous rehearsals, performances, and other related chores. After reaching “sexual maturity” at thirteen, girls were often paid to have sex with men waiting in the opera’s wings. The girls were nicknamed “les petits rats” because they were known to transmit STDs. Degas’s disdain for women, and in particular ballet dancers, is sculpted into Marie’s features to portray moral degeneracy rather than a youthful vibrancy. Audiences derided the ugliness of the pigmented beeswax and clothing and the subject herself (3).

In searching through the Paris Opera’s account books, Laurens found that in 1882, a year after the completion of Degas’s sculpture, Marie was docked in pay due to absence and eventually fired from her dancing post (possibly due to time spent modelling for Degas?) (3). After that, the real little dancer is lost to history.

I made two prints for the Expressive Movement: Dance, Rhythm and Flow Exhibition at the Connective Gallery in the Nepean Creative Arts Centre, March 4 to June 24, 2024. The first, Little Dancer, is a drypoint print after a photo I took of the sculpture at the Met in 2023. I printed it with black ink and collaged some pink Mizutama tissue covering the bodice and tutu. I wanted to bring her to life!

Little Dancer
Drypoint and collage
8×6 inches

At the same time that Degas was working on the Little Dancer sculpture, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey were experimenting with photography to help understand animals and humans in motion. Marey, a physiologist, invented a camera system that allowed the capture of movement on a single plate called chronophotography (4). In Little Dancer Redux, I imagine Marie revived, leaving her static fourth position pose, and lifting her right leg up while extending both her arms outward. I represent each moving limb in three positions as if captured with chronophotography. To differentiate the imagined movements from the original print, I used a trace monotype technique and pink ink.

Little Dancer Redux
Drypoint, trace monotype, and collage
9 ½ x 7 ½ inches

It is my hope that by celebrating The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen we are paying tribute to this young person whose life history is lost but who lives in the minds of all that see her. To Marie van Goethem!

References:

(1) The Met, Conserving Degas, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swh6pYdeR_8.

(2) Clare Vincent, “Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Bronze Sculpture.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–(October 2004). . http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dgsb/hd_dgsb.htm .

(3) Priscilla Frank, “The Story Of Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ Is Disturbing, But Not In The Way You Expect”, Huffpost, Nov 21, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/degas-little-dancer-camille-laurens_n_5bec3dc5e4b0783e0a1ed801. The article references Camille Laurens, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story behind Degas’s Masterpiece. Translated by Willard Wood, Other Press, 2020.

(4) Étienne-Jules Marey, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne-Jules_Marey.

Print Pairings: Colour vs Black and White at the Shenkman Arts Centre

Posted by Beth Shepherd

In the spring of 2023, the Ottawa School of Art Orleans extended a special invitation to the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective to put on a group exhibition in their fabulous gallery at the Shenkman Arts Centre. OGPC worked with the OSAO gallery coordinator, Nadine Argo, to establish an interesting theme: Print Pairings: Colour vs Black and White (May 14-June 24, 2023). Participating artists were asked to provide a pair of prints – one in black and white and one in colour – that would demonstrate how they use colour or black and white to convey separate meanings, place different emphases, create distinct moods, or express diverse emotions around a related theme or image. Because the OSAO gallery has no rules about framing, this was an ideal opportunity for OGPC members to submit larger pieces without incurring the prohibitive costs of framing.

Figure 1: The Print Pairings Vernissage, May 28, 2023

My Submission: Planet Earth Series

A couple of years ago, I made a big woodcut on a piece of scrap 34 by 25-inch plywood. I cut a textured circle sitting positioned high on the wood sheet — a nod to the iconic Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968. After making a proof of the woodcut, I just forgot about it – it was too big and there weren’t many opportunities for this topic. Then for Earth Day this year I pulled it out and used a photo of the plate as the background for a concrete poem acknowledging Earth Day 2023 entitled “Earth Day 1970-2013 We’ve come a long way, baby!” (Figure 2).

Figure 2: “Earth Day 1970-2013 We’ve come a long way, baby!”

For Print Pairings I used the plate as a tableau for reflecting on the climate wars taking place on our fragile planet. The interplay between the black & white and the coloured prints represents the global struggle between petrochemical and green-tech politico-economic behemoths duking it out. We now recognize the harms of our dependence on fossil fuels and climate change. As we struggle to reduce our global CO2 footprint, new technologies have their own negative consequences that result from mining of minerals, metals and rare earths required for green energy.  And despite a shift to “green” energy, petrochemical giants continue to extract oil, coal, and natural gas. 

Figure 3: Planet Earth pair hanging at Shenkman: Petro Planet on the left and Extracted Earth on the right

Petro Planet is a black-and-white relief print starkly reflecting on humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. Humanity’s power to affect planetary systems accelerated after World War II with expansion of global production, especially in the petrochemical sector. Although many scientists, politicians, and people everywhere continue to express concern about the impacts on the fragile blue planet, global fossil fuel interests continue to extract oil, coal, and gas to fuel an overheating Earth. 

Extracted Earth is a colour relief print with collage elements reflecting on the negative impacts of extracting scarce or difficult-to-obtain materials needed for new green technologies. As pressure to limit CO2 rises, many nations are transitioning to a renewable energy infrastructure including solar panels, wind turbines, and battery-driven vehicles. Transition to green technology requires the extraction or recycling of often toxic metals, minerals, and rare-earth substances that severely impact workers and environments where they are mined, processed, and if applicable, recycled.

Migration Exhibition at La Fab Sur Mill

Posted by Beth Shepherd

In 2022 members of the Ottawa-Gatineau Printmakers Connective began our project on Migration, which we all agreed was a timely and important subject. What surprised us all was the variety of perspectives we took: from the vast animal journeys; migrants fleeing from hostilities or immigrants seeking new possibilities; to more ethereal migrations.

The Hanging Team, Beth Shepherd, Madeleine Rousseau, Shealagh Pope, and Freida Hjartarson , at La Fab April 19th

I will quote here from the news release prepared by the La Fab Sur Mill Arts Centre where are exhibition will be showing from April 21 to June 4, 2023:

Migration has always been part of the human condition. Over history, people have moved to seek new opportunities such as a higher-paying job, a better social or cultural setting, or a chance at an education (Deidre Hierlihy: Margaret with jackrabbit (1937)). Human migration too often, however, is not by choice, but by necessity. As of May 2022, it is estimated that more than 100 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced as a result of conflict, persecution, human rights violations, and violence. Roughly 42 per cent of those displaced are children (Murray Dineen, The Littlest Migrant). The act of migration can be perilous. Migrants risk their lives, and some never reach safe haven. Many are not welcomed when they do arrive (Lynda Turner, Reverberations).

Migration is also an ongoing, defining pattern for many animal species. Migratory animals move in response to changing seasons or to use different habitats over their life cycle (Patricia Slighte, Aloft). Many of these migrations are awe-inspiring feats of endurance (Shealagh Pope, On the Move). However, changes to the landscape can threaten the ongoing existence of species that depend on movement for their survival (Beth Shepherd, Flow: Recruitment and Escapement).
Canadians living in inner cities are seeing their access to green space gradually diminish as more infrastructure is built where parks and trees used to be. The migration of green space further out of our ever-sprawling built environment is worrisome for the long-term sustainability of these urban neighbourhoods (Madeleine Rousseau, Vivre sans toi?). In addition to figurative works, the exhibition includes conceptual and abstract interpretations that explore how movement between different realms or media can be represented as migrations (Freida Hjartarson, Migration).

The artists participating in “Migration” raise timely and important political, economic, ecological, and social issues. This exhibition invites the viewer to consider their own relationship or history with migration. The exhibition also allows viewers to gain a better understanding of the distinctive characteristics and vast potential of print-based art and its role in fostering constructive dialogue around contemporary issues. 

Centre des arts La Fab sur Mill Arts Centre

This is a video of the hung show prepared by Richard Austin, Visual Arts director of La Fab Arts Centre. 

Typesetting “Elegy for the Silver Eel” As Concrete Poetry

Posted by Beth Shepherd

I have recently become interested in concrete poetry – where the visual form augments or sometimes supplants the linguistic meaning. On doing further research I learned that concrete poetry is usually associated with the international Concrete Poetry Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement emerged from the work of Eugen Gomringer of Switzerland and the Brazilian Noigandres group, and quickly spread around the world. Although the Concrete Poetry Movement lost its momentum by the 1970s, its legacy and influence live on.

Typically, concrete poets work with the visual power of the page that results from the shape and placement of typographical elements vis-à-vis the whitespace. Applying the notion of concrete to any artform acknowledges its materiality and how that materiality informs its function and meaning. I felt this could be useful in drawing analogies that aid in understanding the materiality of the altered landscape, the loss of species, and the overarching politics of climate change.

This spring I had the opportunity to do some typesetting at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab as part of a creative writing workshop on climate change. In March and April, I typeset my poem “Elegy for the Silver Eel” in a visually expressive form.

Intrigued by duality of Concrete Poetry at the intersection of language and image, I typeset and printed:

  1. “Elegy for the Silver Eel” as a poem – the shaped text with a title on the top and author at the bottom right, in a literary fashion; and
  2. Elegy for the Silver Eel as an object of visual art, where I removed the typeset title author and hand-signed each print at the bottom in the manner of a fine art print.
Figure: Duality of Concrete Poetry

The font for both versions is Helvetic Italic which I thought contributed to the sense of flow. Once typeset, each version was printed using the Vandercook letterpress on 6-inch square artist tiles (Strathmore Bristol, vellum finish, 100 lb.). To read about my process, please click here.

Many thanks go to Nadia Bozak, professor in the English Dept., and Larry Thompson, Master Printer at the Book Arts Lab, Carleton University, for this opportunity.

Concrete Poetry 2023 Video

Posted by Beth Shepherd

I made a video of a talk I gave at the University of Ottawa English Graduate Student Association Conference Looking Through the Anthropocene: Exploring Climate Change and Global Uncertainties, held March 10-12, 2023. 

Starting with Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, I discuss concrete both as a ubiquitous building material accounting for around half of all human-made things in the world today, and as an innovative substance for turning creative ideas into reality, as it appeared to be in the early to mid 20th century. 

The latter would have no doubt inspired the use of the word by the Concrete Poetry Movement active in the 1950s and 1960s. By integrating image and language, these international poets turned poetry into functional objects. Although not critically appreciated in its time, concrete poetry has continued as a poetic form. I discuss my own discovery of concrete poetry and prose, and read three pieces I have written:

– “Horizon is” (2021). “Horizon is” is the soundtrack on my video Horizon Lost and Found that may be found on this website.

– “Elegy for the Silver Eel” (2022), which I wrote last year and presented at the River Institute, and

– “Ode to Ordovician Limestone” (2023), which I wrote this year for a creative writing course I am taking at Carleton University––which won first place in the university-wide annual Songwiting and Poetry Competition!.

Access the Youtube video here.