• Printmaking: silkscreen, relief, tetrapack drypoint, kitchen lithography

• Mixed media including: collage, painting, embroidery, woodworking

• Writing: speculative non-fiction, academic, web copy, correspondence

• Grounding our work in leftover materials from previous projects

• Papermaking as a way to divert waste by using materials such as fabric off-cuts

• Research-creation (where Chapman & Sawchuk's making/holding/crafting/staging and Loveless' polydisciplinamorous and Springgay & Truman's in-tensions are in conversation)

• Iterative mimesis (where counterstory, artivism, and defamiliarization are in conversation)

• Autotheory

NVF: There is something for allowing for, listening to, and following an impulse.

CH: And then being open to that impulse changing.

NVF: And thinking about that impulse as living.

CH: And that was the turning point, where it went from yarn on canvas to multi-media.

NVF: Yeah, and then you were like do you have paper? Because you needed it to be something else. And actually it might be worth noting that you started feeling uncomfortable in your body, where you were doing the sleeve cuff thing, and grabbing the neck of your shirt, like you were physically discomforted.

CH: Yeah, I remember a really physically uncomfortable feeling.

NVF: And you kept saying “I need to explode this”.

CH: After it left the bounds of yarn and canvas it was fine.

NVF: And you wanted acrylics, and I remember I brought you ink, with the paper, and then I was like “Hey look at these tulip stamens”.

CH: Which I used!

NVF: And then it was really interesting, because as you were doing that, I started becoming unsatisfied with what I was doing, and then I started feeling uncomfortable with the idea of not knowing what to do. So I was on this sort of panicky edge.

CH: But after you felt discomfort, didn’t you do something to your piece?

NVF: Not yet, I don’t think yet. Oh I started doing the weaving part, so it went from just stitching to adding weaving and adding other techniques, and starting to open it up a little in that way. It wasn’t until you left that I kept going with other techniques and then I cut the canvas, and made that acrylic paint and paper goop.

CH: I remember wondering if you felt pressure to do something outside your comfort zone.

NVF: Yeah I remember you said something like that, and I thought it was more an invitation, more about how I learned how these very small ways to do some of what I wanted to do, just enough of what I wanted to do, to get that out, but not so much that anyone would necessarily notice. Which was a real theme in my visual art practice, generally, where my practice, I would tuck it into something. I call it stealth mode, so for example, when I did glass, I made sure that the pieces other people saw, I made things that were very pretty and proficient, and the experiments were what I kept, which are not technically reasonable. Or with fibre for example, I learned really quickly to design and knit accessories and use fiber in practical ways because they offered a bridge between myself and the people I cared about , and people I really depended on, like certain family members.

CH: So that experiment of the canvas piece, is that in line or different?

NVF: It’s different. In doula work, the question was “what do you do when you don’t know what to do”. And that’s something we needed to think about a lot. In the modality in which I trained, we had to train around that question. So there was that moment when I was panicking, and then I said wait, I have training. So I sat and listened, and that’s when I realized I wanted to cut the canvas and I allowed myself to do that. I felt like I was apprenticing, and when I observed you go through this discomfort and start doing according to what felt right, it invited me to listen to a level of information I had in myself that I had long ago cut off or silenced somehow. And then when that opened up, it became a lot of fun.

CH: I really like how we weave in whatever we’re learning in the moment into whatever it is we’re doing. I really like that.

NVF: The idea of following the impulse, I think exploding methodology is reasonable, and there is this poly form situation, emergence is obvious, one of things I learned was that there was the point I wanted to take this off the frame, and then I saw how shitty that frame was, and then there was something about impression, and so I impressed my hand into the frame, and I think about printmaking and impressing something. That whole constellation of both being with people and ideas, the idea of impression, and also impressing, and working together, there was a sense of I was impressed by your capacity to be free with what you were doing.

CH: It’s interesting for me to hear that because for me, the process wouldn’t necessarily be perceived as impressive, if the end product wasn’t impressive. I mean, to be free wouldn’t be impressive if you didn’t have something great to show at the end.

NVF: The end product wasn’t in sight, and I was impressed by your process. And you have more attachment to end product then I do, I mean I do as well. Maybe that’s a living question, which has to do with the end product and process and that’s something that’s come up a lot.

CH: For sure. I think there is a thread in conceptual theme as well.

NVF: Ooh tell me.

CH: There’s something about the physical body that keeps appearing in our work. And it’s interesting to me how that is happening. I think you mentioned that the ink in your canvas piece was the same colour we used in the tetrapak project, which reminded both of us of viscera. And then there is that theme of scar tissue and adhesion, and then these pieces inform the hoodies which are actual sweaters for our bodies. And these pieces, they start as separate projects and then become collaborative.

NVF: And in between the canvas project and tetrapak project, we did the screen workshop, which also started off as individual projects, and then we ended up collaborating by screening onto each other’s work. And bringing it back to your work, those quotes, we picked those quotes because you were having a really hard minute thinking of going back to physiotherapy classes, so there is something about insulation that is coming up for me.

Maybe the methodology there is, I don’t know what to call it, it’s both adjacent and collaborative, it’s not pure adjacency and pure collaborative. While it’s collaborative, at no point have we conformed. We’ve been able to maintain what’s important to each of us in the process, and there have been moments of light friction or light abrasion, but not conflict, nothing that ruptures but takes attention.

CH: And I’m curious, are those things that matter to each of us different?

NVF: I think the way we know how to be with those things are different. We have mutually held goals, which is make stuff, show stuff, get stuff funded, make a life where you get to make stuff. And your way of approaching it, and my way of approaching is different but very complementary. If this work is to be generating and valuing an expanded imagination, or an expanded epistemological imagination. It is through making and being together and attending to one another and one another’s needs and impulses, that what I come to know or how I come to know is so much richer not only in terms of an expanded knowledge but in terms of how I understand what I thought I knew coming in. So it’s all about attending the body, the skill, the impulse, and not being distracted by performances of attention, for example what you have to do in PT, that is new, at least new to us. I don’t actually know if this is new.

CH: For me, there is something especially resonant about making it richer, what you thought you knew, especially for my personal artistic practice because I came back to printmaking with specific scar tissue, and being in this space with you has made my relationship to printmaking different than what I think it would have been had I come back alone. It would have been easy to feel back into that scarred place, or to have been distracted by that if I came back to printmaking by myself I think.

NVF: There's a time gap between the art in the hoodie that was made, a considerable one. So speaking to where the making of the art, there's going to be this time warping in this conversation and also what we know now and mapping some of that on to what we learned as we were collaboratively co-making this.

CH: The first piece for the first hoodie was making side by side and making in conversation, and our first go I guess but this one was an actual printing on each other's prints but I can't remember if that was intentional.

NVF: No, what happened was we had the opportunity to shoot some screens like it was that two-day workshop, right? So we pulled flats essentially the first day and then between the two days we made the screens.

CH: And that evening when we were making the stencils, I think maybe that was the beginning of a different way of working, well maybe not a different way, but another way of working.

NVF: Yeah for both of us because If I recall correctly you had those images. You had actual photographs and then if I remember correctly you were like, it would be cool to take this angle and be able to do these things with it, but that's not for me. And I was like, oh! That's for me. Because we did that before the canvas project, right?

CH: No, the canvas project was first. The beginnings of the canvas project was first. That was April. This was May. Not far apart, but we had at least started the canvas prior to this workshop.

NVF: Okay, cool. So it really is bridging from this piece for the second hoodie.

CH: For the stencils, you were doing the very tediously meticulous design that I couldn't bear to do, and we were at Lindsay and Danielle’s table doing that.

NVF: So I was doing that one. But you were doing one where you were taking the curtain rod you were changing sizes. And then also you were doing the stenciling of those lines with, they look like suture lines essentially too, right?

CH: Yeah, what was that from? It was very specific and I can't remember. It was from something though. And you're right. There was a reference to suturing. What source was I using? I think it was from the canvas project. 

NVF: I think so too. If you just scroll up on the website, it is exactly from the canvas project. Those lines match. I don't think I realized how direct that through line was.

CH: Yeah, because it was still really fresh.

NVF:  And they were still open pieces right? It wasn't just fresh but they were open. I really love these flats. I forgot how much I enjoyed them.

CH: Oh! We had two screens and we were each working with a screen and we wanted to maximize possibility. So one of them we kept as an open flat and one of them we used for stenciling. And then I remember things like us asking if we were done with that particular, whatever and then I think at one point you said, “I still have this particular color, in that stencil” and I was like, “Excellent, I absolutely want to use that” or me being like, “I really like the colorway that you used. Can I use that?” And then I feel it slowly went from there.

NVF: And there was nothing even slow about it too. I think that was kind of one of the interesting things about that workshop too is the volume of pieces we were playing with and trying to move it while the ink was still mobile, without having to add too much of the thing that keeps the ink alive. And there was that piece that you did. I'm actually looking at the process photos. There's the last of the process photos which has a bunch of our flats.

NVF: And there's that corner remember and you had pulled a lot of that corner and that's became part of the basis of the more tedious screen was actually to pull in that corner from the flat. There was a conversation between the canvas pieces and the flats and the photographs of the Time Warp little room situation and the screen that we made.

CH: I really wanted that corner. 

NVF: Yes, you were very attached to it.

CH: But it didn't turn out in terms of what I had kind of thought. And it kind of worked out in a really odd way. I didn't end up using any of the stencils specific to that bedroom, those butterflies and flower hangings, and I think there are drapes and rods and all that I didn't use any of that to make any of the corner more situated in a bedroom.

NVF: It's funny to me because then when we fast forward to this quote that emerged a month later. Because we had originally planned a different quote for the hoodie, too. And that quote pivoted in July and then we did this artwork. We matched this artwork to the hoodie. When did we get the hoodies to people? When did we start?

CH: January right?

NVF: So that's the biggest gap of time though, was between the workshop, picking this quote and then putting this art with this quote. 

CH: You wanted this quote during your candidacy. You want to talk a little bit more about that?

NVF: Yeah, I think what was happening with my candidacy was because of the nature of that exam right? It's so many consecutive sprints. And because essentially I was coordinating my experience of the unknown. We encounter an experience of the unknown and then we respond to it. But usually that response is more reaction than response and I think my reaction was perfectionism. I needed to be beyond reproach. Candidacy needed to happen in a way where I would be beyond reproach. Which is not real. And then it was holding on to this quote, and then I was physically burning myself out to do that. In terms of preparing because I had the questions in advance that I could think about and read about and curate my readings around and then there was something about this quote that reminded me, it was an invitation to not toss away the purpose of the project or myself as a beneficiary of that purpose so that I could enact this very specific academic performance in a very specific way. I think? That's what I'm remembering.

CH: This quote being an invitation to you in that moment, where you were striving for a very specific version of candidacy and what that meant? For me there's invitation there as well. Not the same invitation, but an invitation to do things differently. Potentially this quote could be thought of as invitation to do candidacy in a values aligned way that isn't typically modeled or even taught. You get taught how to do candidacy and what candidacy looks like. And I kind of feel like making all these pieces together and ultimately this particular square together, is an invitation to art and creating and printmaking in a way that isn't typical in how it's currently taught and how it's currently done and what potentially making work together could look like. It wasn't like we had laid it out and we shall do this and this is what collaboration looks like and this is what co-creation looks like and you will each take turns, we didn't do any of that. It was just impulses and responding and creativity and flow but flow together, which was different for me. I thought that was really interesting. So that felt like an invitation for me.

NVF: And hearing you say that is reminding me that also coincided with your return to printmaking studio. There was also the specific invitation to let down a series of practices and maybe that's like a parallel as well? I remember you remarking a number of times during that workshop that it was different and more fun than you were anticipating.

CH: Yeah, yeah. My first time back after eight years. And the screen printing specifically was an experience that I had a very specific idea of what screen printing would be and the fact that we took a monoprinting class in the first place was interesting because that was not what I was taught. You can't edition mono prints, and doing it with you, it was not the screen printing I remembered and that return was really kind.

NVF: So I'm hearing that this quote is an invitation to kindness. For candidacy, it became more about how we were all getting together. And what would be in that space rather than worrying too much about whether or not the academic performance was going to work out.

CH: And for this, it was process driven. We were not concerned about product. It was not about, is this image turning out? Are these choices turning out? Those were not our deciding factors, that wasn't what was motivating us, which is really interesting too.

NVF: I'm thinking about the time after when we were in studio to do screen at A/P and I had a horrendous time that day, when partly what made the workshop so fun was that we had access to SNAP’s collection of orphan ink containers so we could just play with existing colors. There were no stakes whatsoever. And then when we returned to studio, it was, Oh if there's going to be a color we have to make it, which then also brought in this scarcity of resources thing, and also it's how do you even imagine? So for example the colors I ended up loving so much in that workshop, I never would have made, let alone in combination. But seeing them there as options, particularly after everybody snapped up all the other colours, working with what was in the space? That was far more kind and generous to me than starting from scratch, which I think is an interesting thing in the context of thinking about this project as a whole. It's not about designing a new Faculty of Rehabilitative Medicine or a new Faculty of Kinesiology. it's not about wiping the so-called slate clean. 

NVF: So this is the one where we tried to make a collaborative Tetra Pak print, but in the end we made individual prints side by side, then cut them up and pieced them together.

CH: Right — cutting apart the Tetra Pak pieces and re-assembling them was the novel part for me. I like doing that.

NVF: For me, it was the first visual piece where I went one step too far — I’d added something and immediately wished I could undo it, but I couldn’t.

CH: Your first experience of overworking something.

NVF: Exactly. I remember a specific moment that day when you were seeking novelty, getting frustrated, and I was ready to throw mine out because of the overworking. You said, “How about I just take that?” That’s how the piece started to shift.

CH: And the colour happened because we only had red and blue to work with that day for some reason.

NVF: We ended up liking the colour — weirdly, it’s close to the colour of the hoodie itself.

CH: This was also when we realized that collaborative work for us is actually parallel, side-by-side work.

NVF: Yeah -- or at least part of it is, or part of it at the time that piece was made is, and that had to do with constraints — we were working across cities then, and had limited time on site. We could never really work on something at the same time unless we squeezed it into a weekend. Looking back, that felt like too much pressure.

CH: It’s hard to make collaborative prints. It’s not something I was taught to do, and it’s not typical practice either.

NVF: I’d love to try a process where you start on a Tetra Pak, then pass it to me, and I respond, and we go back and forth. That would be pure response — we each lose control of executing a vision. Kind of like that game of starting a picture, folding the page, and passing it to someone else.

CH: That would require a lot of trust — both in each other and in the work itself.

NVF: Yes. And that’s something that has built slowly between us — trust in the collaborative relationship, in ourselves, and in this as work.

CH: I still feel a little wobbly there. For me, the wobbliness isn’t about whether it’s “work” but about working visually over years, in fragments. I’m not used to that. It’s literally the opposite of how I was taught.

NVF: I can relate. My MFA took twelve years — kids, disability — and for three of those years I literally couldn’t read. I had to learn to write in fragments, 250 words at a time. That changed how I understood what counts as work and what counts as finished.

CH: Yeah, maybe that’s it — sitting with the idea that this kind of slow, fragmented, piecemeal making is still valid work.

NVF: In a supervisory meeting recently, Danielle Peers said, "the difference between unfinished and finished is just that with finished work, someone takes your crayons away." I found that helpful when thinking about the dissertation. The kinds of questions we attend to in our work are unfinishable.

CH: That helps. I think I’ve moved the needle since we started this project.

NVF: Timing is strange. We keep coming back to that — the lag time needed to look at the work with a kind eye.

CH: I wish for the kind of immersion I can’t bring anymore. I want more hours behind each piece.

NVF: But you do have those hours — just not in-studio hours. Thinking, processing, living — those count. This work is interstitial.

CH: Yeah… maybe that’s part of what this project teaches.

***

One thing that came up in our conversation about this specific hoodie was the differences in meaning the word "persist" holds for each of us.

CH: <insert>

NVF: For me, persistence speaks to a lot of things I care about. What I want to say about this needs a great deal more contextualization and personal disclosure than I am interested in providing in this specific form of website. What I can say is that I am disenchanted by politics of ambition across the spectrum and the enactments of aspiration they demand. To me, to persist is not a foreclosure on flourishing or thriving, nor is persistence merely a diminished precondition to those other two aspirational states. To me, persistence is not only against and despite sets of odds, but it co-conditions some of the algorithm by which such odds are meted. If I may defer to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's book As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance (2017), I wonder if it would be okay to hold persistence as I experience it, and as I hope it for others as a way "to dream otherwise".

In progress

Restless. Impatient. Continuing. Hopeful.

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." - Paulo Freire

We chose this quote on our fifth hooded sweatshirt. These hoodies are worn on our physical bodies as invitations.

<more here>

In progress

• <more>

Works in process:

In progress

• CH: I haven't been able to pick up mezzotint in over a year due to chronic illness and the lack of physical capacity to work in this way. This particular print method is physically intensive. I did not realize the full extent of this until experiencing an illness that limits energy. I am curious about how I will be finishing this print.