In the fall of 2020, SKETCH asked members of the original Making with Place project to find new ways to engage our communities! I knew I wanted to do a collaborative zine, one of my favourite ways to create opportunities for artists to remotely collaborate and be paid for existing pieces of work.
I decided to focus in on work by artists who are racialized (Black Indigenous or People of Colour), belong to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, and identify as Disabled (including Mad, chronically ill and Deaf/Hard of Hearing folks).
This collaborative zine features 5 super-talented community artists that are doing intentional and beautiful work: Amelia R-N, Billy Parrell, Destiny Pitters, Jasbina Justice and Lilah Hillman.
The artists were asked to share existing or new work about the theme of ‘place’. And to explore/theorize what comes to mind when thinking about ‘making with place’.
- Trinidadian-Canadian zine-maker Amelia R-N uses collage to explore occupying spaces “either lived in or loitered around”
- Métis artist-educator Billy Parrell discusses “artful knowledge sharing” with creative instruction for making watercolour paints from salvaged flowers
- Black artist of Jamaican descent Destiny Pitters discusses how her collages explore the displacement of slavery and the “trickiness of place as location”
- artist and sex worker of colour Jasbina Justice unpacks their poetry as expressing “the straddling place, that strange liminal space where life’s banality, abject cruelty, weirdness and impossible beauty meld”
- Indiqueer artist Lilah Hillman employs collage and textile arts to explore “the places we call home (and) the idea of home as a character in our lives”
I invite you in to this powerful work.
With love and gratitude.
Pree. (they/them) @stickymangos
Priya (Pree) Rehal is an artist educator currently based in Tkaronto, originally from Tiohtià:ke. They’re the children of immigrant settlers from Punjab. Pree’s work centres their identity as a queer, non-binary, trans, disabled, fat, and racialized individual. They have an interdisciplinary arts practice under the name: Sticky Mangos and co-founded the Non-Binary Colour Collective.
Follow Pree and their arts practice at www.prehal.com and on Instagram @StickyMangos.
