Elvira Hufschmid

In residence: 2017, 2018

Interested in sensory drawing as a way of visualising the layers of experience of a place, Elvira has been spending time in different locales in Tuwanek. Over the last two years, she has begun to accumulate a series of resonances through a slow drawing practice that reflects her attempts to connect and translate an experience of this area.

Elivra's statement: "The Sunshine Coast is on unceded Coast-Salish territory and has been inhabited for thousands of years. The Coppermoss residency is located at the edge of what we call a wilderness region, a self–sustained area with minimal human impact. The environmentalist Bob Jickling once called “wild” as something that is “self-willed”. It evolves along its own parameters, not along human interests, as all the plants and animals have an unbroken “will of their own”. Here, you find places that may have traditionally been assigned a narrative, for example, at landmarks or prominent outlooks. But other less prominent sites seem to carry stories, too. Those stories may stem from events that might have taken place there earlier or from encounters that might have happened there, and they may be the stuff myths are made of.

My intuitive drawing practice taps into those layers of experience. Sensory drawing, for me, is a way to connect to the land and the stories it has to tell. There are places that speak more than others. With eyes closed, images are drawn that emerge before the mind’s eye. The practice comes about as an immediate performative expression of the perceived through gesture drawing, and represents a recording of a perceptual process. Accumulated over a certain period of time, the collection of drawings form a map (of imagination) on the specific locations. My interest lays in the investigation of mental imagery that emerges in an altered state of consciousness, and in resonance with the specific site by responding to a fleeting though tangible texture already inscribed in the place. In Tuwanek, the land seems to literally speak to you."

Elvira Hufschmid is a Vancouver-Berlin based visual artist, curator and author in the field of Processes of Artistic Transformation, Collaborative Art and Temporary Art Spaces. She is sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver, Canada, and is collaborating with Ingrid Koenig, Randy Lee Cutler and Margit Schild on a SSHRCC Insight Grant Art & Physics project at Emily Carr University. Elvira was Artist in Residence at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre, Vancouver (2011-2014), and co-curated the Goethe Satellite@Vancouver RAW DATA. Artistic Transformation project (2012).

Her work has been shown in galleries and museums across Germany, Switzerland, France, the US and Canada, and she has been active within the Independent-Project-Spaces-Community in Berlin, Germany. As a member of the Arts Collective Initiative Temporary Art Spaces e.V. Berlin, she co-edited the publication Kunstraum AVUS, released by E.A. Seemann Verlag Leipzig in 2013. She is a co-author of the book Artistic Transformations. Models of a Collective Production of Art and the Dialogue between the Arts, released by the Reimer Verlag Berlin in 2010 (in German). Elvira was a Guest Professor for “Artistic Transformation Processes“ at the Berlin University of the Arts (UDK) in a team of eleven artists and academics (2007-2009). She holds a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, US (2002). www.elvira-hufschmid.de

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