Rosemary Burden + Debbie Tuepah

In residence: 2018

Rosemary and Debbie undertook a week-long residency that included intensive walks and site visits to different areas in and around Tuwanek.

In their words: “As artists, curators and entrepreneurs who engage with the social and environmental, we relish the opportunity to quell the overactive mind to embrace contemplation, investigation, engagement, and creation. We seek an experience of unfolding — as individuals, a group, and respectfully, as visitors to the region’s eco-system, the traditional territory of the shíshálh Nation, and if the opportunity exists, through engagement with the shíshálh peoples and local community. This residency will serve as an opportunity to investigate, expand, and challenge the creative potential of landscape management through a series of site-specific sculptural installations made primarily of invasive plant species and found materials from the area. Our research would begin by gathering intimate knowledge on the colonial and indigenous plant life in the environment and the specific histories attached to their prevalence. This research would come to inform specific details including methods used to transform these resources, and the forms we plan to generate. As we begin to harvest and collect materials, we will further our research by interviewing the intake. This process will assist in our ability to tell the story of these materials and expand upon our role as stewards and interpreters of this material.”

Rosemary Burden - http://www.rosemaryburden.com/page/

A 2011 graduate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Rosemary Burden is a Canadian artist living and working in Vancouver BC. Her work is frequently experimental, informed and inspired by science and the natural world, particularly biology and particle physics. Burden’s practice often utilizes the notion of repetition — butterfly migration patterns, the cellular growth found in nature and computer binary language — to create mixed media installation works and drawings created from materials such as old books, plants, beads, and found objects. Nurtured and raised in sunshine and play, Burden likes to reference joy and play in her work, and as a respected gardener/botanist, hiker, and traveller she is often found creating temporary site-specific installations in unexpected locations. Burden is a 2011 graduate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, is a member of the Nimbus Studio Artist Cooperative, and a member of 13 Feet Off the Ground, a collective of Vancouver artists who are currently participating in the residency program Graniti Murales in Sicily.

Debbie Westergaard Tuepah - http://www.debbietuepah.com/index.html

Interrogating data and mass media as points of origin, Tuepah’s work considers the conceptual and embodied experience of information in relation to contemporary issues and events. Relying predominantly on yarn, paint, found, and readymade objects, her work operates in 3 dimensional space with networks and ‘data-bytes’ of material standing in for systems, modes of measurement, or visceral realities. Tuepah received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2011, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. Exhibitions of her work include The Reach Gallery Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery’s Family Fuse, Surrey Art Gallery, Bellevue Washington's Sculpture Biennial, Ontario’s DNA Artspace, and Access Gallery as a finalist for the 2016 CASV Emerging Artist Award. Debbie is a founding member of the curatorial collective AgentC Projects, and is a member of CAM, a group working with BC Artscape and the City of Surrey to develop a board-directed contemporary art gallery and arts centre in South Surrey.  

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