5 à 7 : Meet the Artists of the SPHERE Festival

Diane Borsato is an award-winning artist, educator, amateur mycologist, and beekeeper who works closely with other artists and amateur naturalists. Among many other gestures she has stolen flowers (Bouquet, 2006), foraged for fungi in New York City (Chinatown Foray, 2010), practiced stillness with beekeepers (Your Temper, My Weather, 2013/2022), identified clouds in a museum collection (Cloud Party, 2017), mapped a neighborhood by smells (Olfactory Map, 2017) and most recently, planted an orchard of rare and unusual apple varietals as public art (ORCHARD, 2019 – ongoing). She has performed and exhibited in Canada and internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, the AGYU, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Art Centre Fogo Island Arts, the Creative Time Summit, and at the Toronto Biennial of Art. www.dianeborsato.net 

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a rawlings is a mineral, plant, animal, person, place, or thing. Also known as Dr. Angela Rawlings, they are a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher who works with languages as dominant exploratory material. Their practice seeks and interrogates relationality between bodies—be they human, more-than-human, other-than, non. Meditating on languages as inescapable lenses of human engagement, rawlings’ methods over the past twenty years have included sensorial poetries, vocal and contact improvisation, theatre of the rural, and conversations with landscapes.  

rawlings has an extensive solo and group performance and exhibition background. They have performed throughout North America, Europe, and Australia at festivals including Roskilde Festival (Denmark), Oslo International Poetry Festival (Norway), and Tectonics Music Festival (Iceland, Scotland). Their work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Dedee Shattuck Gallery (USA), Hafnarborg (Iceland), Hanstholm Fyr (Denmark), and Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway). 

rawlings’ books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017), Sound of Mull (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2019). Their book Wide slumber was adapted to music theatre by Valgeir Sigurðsson and VaVaVoom (2014). Their libretti include Bodiless (for Gabrielle Herbst, 2014) and Longitude (for Davíð Brynjar Franzson, 2014). rawlings’ Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights (2013).

rawlings received their PhD from the University of Glasgow where they researched how to perform geochronology in the Anthropocene. In 2021-22, they are researching becoming-with whales in the climate crisis as a postdoctoral fellow with H.M. Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society. rawlings also teaches at the Iceland University of the Arts in the MFA for Performing Arts and MA in Music (New Audiences and Innovative Practices). rawlings loves in Iceland.

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rebecca bruton (CAN) is a composer, songmaker, and vocalist living just north of Moh’kinsstis; the place where the Bow and Elbow Rivers converge; the place where the world began (Siksiká). She creates work that moves in the narrow space between sorrow and celebration; her interests include the pace of trekking through the Rocky Mountains, land/blood memory, the choreographic, multi-species kinship, and the malleable nature of time itself. 

rebecca creates across several musical mediums, including experimental chamber music, song, film scores, and free improvisation. Her chamber compositions are widely performed, having been commissioned by Ekmeles vocal ensemble (NYC), Quatuor Bozzini (Montréal), Quasar Quatuor de saxophones (Montréal), Arraymusic (Toronto), Ultraviolet Ensemble (Edmonton), and more. In 2023 she will premiere The Faerie Ribbon, a new work for expanded string quintet performed by Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective (Toronto). The Faerie Ribbon will be released as one side of a collaborative LP of music for expanded string quintet, a multi-year project she devised and co-led with Toronto-based composer Jason Doell. 

rebecca is an avid collaborator, especially across disciplines. In the fall of 2021 rebecca performed in the premiere of ‘We needed to be rescued’, a collaborative movement and music work she co-created with choreographer and dancer Heather Ware (produced by Dancers Studio West). She also tends to a long-term collaborative friendship with multidisciplinary artist Angela Rawlings, having set Angela’s 2017 book si tu to microtonal music for four voices (I n s t i t u, 2021), and collaborated with Angela in the polyvocal duo Moss Moss Not Moss. 

rebecca lives closely intertwined with her more-than-human furfaced besties Hamish, Ramsay, and Mucho. 

The ongoing photography series Eyes as Big as Plates started out in 2011 studying personifications of nature and folkloric explanations of natural phenomena. A decade later it has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging in nature, taking the Norwegian-Finnish artist duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen to sixteen countries on a quest to understand our relationship with our surroundings. The second book in the series features new portraits produced in collaboration with retired wrestling coaches, pub patrons, Sami reindeer herders, Aboriginal uncles, kantele players, librarians, wild boar hunters, and surfers across four continents. To mark the project's ten-year anniversary, it also includes contributions from several guest writers and an extended field notes section revealing the behind-the-scenes action of each portrait. 

Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth have collaborated since 2011 on publications and projects including Eyes as Big as Plates (ongoing), The World in London (2012), Time is a ship that never casts anchor (2014–18), Signal, Lights, Connected for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics (2018), TEDMED Talk 2020, and Finnskogen Understories (ongoing). Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2008. Norwegian photographer, artist and writer Karoline Hjorth received her MA from the University of Westminster (London) in 2009. 

Performer, composer, curator Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir is one of Iceland’s leading figures within the early and contemporary music scene. She has been the artistic director of Nordic Affect since its inception in 2005. Halla Steinunn’s work has been a tour de force when it comes to work with composers, performers, visual artists, and producers. She is driven by an ecosystemic outlook on creation, set to further explore its world-making possibilities through music‘s many mediated relationships. 

Halla Steinunn‘s compositional output has spanned everything from electro-acoustic compositions to sound and media installations. 2018 saw the release of her work He(a)r on Nordic Affect’s album by the same title. The album was featured in various best-of- the-year lists, including The Boston Globe, I Care if You Listen and Second Inversion. Recent works have included Spherical White with Diamond, a site-respondent installation created for Curated Place and NATUR (UK) in collaboration with National Trust Formby (UK) and Fjärilarna steg upp (The butterflies ascended) an installation of 8 mono channels created for The Botanical Garden in Lund (SE). Among upcoming projects, alongside the NAC Orchestra’s commission is the release of the strengur album project on Carrier Records. 

Meryl McMaster earned her BFA in Photography from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (2010) and is currently based in Québec, Canada. Known for her large-format self-portraits that have a distinct performative quality, she explores questions of self through land, lineage, history, and culture, with specific reference to her mixed nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch ancestry.  

McMaster’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (2021), McCord Steward Museum, Montreal (2021), Canada House, London (2020), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019), Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto (2019), Glenbow, Calgary (2019), The Room, St. John's (2018) Momenta Biennale, Montreal (2017), Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (2015), and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2015), amongst others.  

From 2016-2020, her solo exhibition Confluence travelled to nine cities in Canada, including stops at the Richmond Art Gallery (2017), Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay (2017), University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2018), and The Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery, Sarnia (2020).

Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2021), Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2020), Australian Centre for Photography, Australia (2019), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018), Ottawa Art Gallery (2018, 2019), Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (2016, 2019), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2019), Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Winnipeg (2017), and Art Gallery of Guelph (2017), amongst others.

She was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles New Discovery Award 2019 and longlisted for the 2016 Sobey Art Award and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, REVEAL Indigenous Art Award, Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists, Canon Canada Prize, Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and OCAD U Medal.  

Her work has been collected by significant Canadian institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. 

A naturalist, conceptualist and multidisciplinary artist. Matt Ceolin was raised in Canada’s rural northern woodlands and has dedicated his life to learning from the complexities of the natural world. He lives and bases his studio practice on the land and in the forests of Algoma. His work is informed by an integrated and ongoing engagement with land, its complex ecologies and the entities within, and reflects his pursuit of a more visceral sensibility of their perception and portrayal. His visual work has been exhibited at galleries in Canada, the United States, and Iceland.