The Welcome Project + Migration
... to create a professional artwork by engaging the community in a dialogue through art practice to examine the issues of racism, diversity, integration and
inclusion. These difficult conversations are to be held during several community workshops both structured and unstructured. The artist will take the ideas and / or images developed through the workshops to create a piece of artwork using their own art practice.
The project is composed of two parts. The first entitiled the Welcome Project is a series of 10 workshops where participants will tell stories through images, words and objects, using birdhouses as a metaphor for migration and finding and making a new home. The ideas and stories developed in the workshop will inform a Public Art project for the Coquitlam Public Library tentatively entitled Migration.
As described in the City of Coquitlam’s RFIQ
Artist Statement
I thought about the various cultural groups that make up this community and how an ongoing process of change and global forces are at play.
I considered the huge effect, the benefits that this change has brought and visualized the massive flow of people across the face of the earth. People leaving their ancestral homes for a variety of reasons: economic, war, environmental. Crossing continents to find a new home. The largest migration that we have ever known, a migration that is changing the world and offering an opportunity to create new, diverse, successful communities or ones that could fall into the trap of bigotry, racism and intolerance.
side “spy” holes
interior
