Video – Three new art installations in Canada’s Capital Region
Transcript of the video – Three new art installations in Canada’s Capital Region
Duration of the video: 00:04:49
[Call and Response]
Erin McCluskey: For me, making murals is kind of an excuse to inject colour into the city landscape.
I find it's really nice to inject these colours that maybe aren't just found in the nature of the city, and have sort of a coloured explosion in one area, and it's just colour for colour’s sake, just to break your eye from maybe the monotony of gray.
Émilie Proux: [Translated from French] Art within an urban environment like this, is really important because it brings a bit of poetry to the urban space.
If there are details I want to draw attention to, it's actually nature that I wanted to bring back into the urban space to reintroduce greenery, even if it's somewhat artificial.
Meegan Lim: Hi, my name is Meegan Lim. I'm the illustrator of Fins to Feathers, which is now installed at the Corktown Footbridge.
When I'm creating public art in particular, the considerations I have when I'm creating it specifically when it's outdoors, also, is that I pay attention to the environment and how the space is being used.
Erin McCluskey: What I love about a piece of art that you encounter often is finding little things all the time when you look at it.
So if you were standing at the bus stop across the street and you're looking at this mural, maybe one day you'd be focused on the cream-coloured shape with the orange dot on the blue background.
And the next day, maybe this green shape with, you know, cream lines in it would catch your eye. So there's always something new, and you can kind of just lose yourself in those.
Émilie Proux: [Translated from French] My creative process is, I often think about things I want to illustrate things that matter to me.
I often find inspiration in nature. Since I work in illustration, I usually base my work on a connection between text and image.
From there, I start sketching I go through several pages of sketches before landing on something that really interests me.
Meegan Lim: The aspect of creating art for the wider public that I most enjoy is having some sort of representation in some way.
I love flexing my creative skills, but for it to really connect with people is really the cherry on top.
That's something I’ve found when I put my work out there, is that, if it's a very personal topic, someone will kind of resonate with it.
Émilie Proux: [Translated from French] What’s also interesting about urban art is that it’s accessible to everyone. In the sense that you don’t need to go to a museum. It’s also right there, along the path of passersby. So everyone can truly appreciate art in the urban space.
Erin McCluskey: Call and Response to me immediately, evoked the idea of animals. I landed on birds because I think birds are the creature we most often hear communicating.
So my favourite bird call is from the mourning doves and I used to hear it a lot growing up in Ottawa so, that's how I landed on morning doves.
Émilie Proux: [Translated from French] I’d like visitors to take away from my work the idea that we can have an impact on our environment, that we need to pay attention to what surrounds us in order to create something better.
Erin McCluskey: For me, art is, can be, kind of a meditative thing. So I hope that people, maybe they, their eyes fall on it and it just takes them out of their busy day for a moment, and they just maybe the colour, you know, allows them to just meditate or, have a calm moment.
Meegan Lim: I see my work at the end of the day, when it's first installed as an interruption of someone's typical day because it's something new whenever you see something new in your neighbourhood, you stop. Hopefully it's a good thing when they see my work and it's my job to ensure that it's positive.
It might be a little bit more introspective or a little sad. Whatever the piece, intention is there. And then hopefully eventually the artwork kind of becomes just a part of their everyday, it becomes, a reference point to meeting someone for dinner “I’m going to go meet you at the staircase of this mural” and it just becomes part of the space.
I think that's a really fun part of public art.