A Tribute to Healthcare Workers with artsPlace

In fall of 2020 artsPlace and I collaborated to facilitate a community mural thanking healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our finished mural would be completed by the hands of our community and hung in the Canmore Hospital. Of equal importance to us was creating an opportunity for community members to look after their emotional well being through art and connection to nature, and having an opportunity for community members to safely come together and connect.

Inspired by some of my past work that explored identity, connection to nature, and resilience through superimposed portraiture and landscapes, we decided to have a healthcare worker superimposed with the very recognizable mountain skyline of Canmore. Looking down at our valley home, our healthcare worker and landscape would be composed of tiles painted by community members.

These tiles, carefully arranged and pre-coloured, would be painted with nature motifs that each individual community member created when asked “where do you find resilience, hope, and connection in nature”?. Our hope was to create a mosaic that facilitated a feeling of reflected resilience in the artists themselves.

After I completed a basic sketch of the mural, we sent this off to Mural Mosaic out of Edmonton, AB. They then rendered a copy that included our numbered tiles and a colour plan. After prepping our tiles, Mural Mosaic sent them our way! Back at artsPlace we brought community together in-person (socially distancing of course!), or sent tiles to community members homes, to be painted in the blues, greys and greens that make up our valley home that protected us, and gave us a sense of calm during this turbulent time.

It was an honour to be asked to design and facilitate this project. Not only to thank our health care workers, but also to be able to witness the amazing perseverance, positivity, and resilience of the community I had only recently begun to call home.

I love you Canmore!