Our heritage

Our heritage

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Octopus presents Ernest Swanson

Ernest began engraving in 2004 under Haida jeweller, Jim McGuire. In 2005, he started carving wood with Christian White and his cousin, Jim Hart. This same year, he also won an ‘Emerging Artist’ award from British Columbia’s Alliance of Arts and Culture. In 2009, Ernest graduated from Vancouver's Northwest Coast Jewellery Arts program under established Haida/Kwakwaka'wakw artist, Dan Wallace. Recently, Ernest has been working on a large pole with Jim Hart at the Bill Reid Gallery in Vancouver.




Thursday, March 4, 2010

Octopus presents Ellen Scobie

Artist Statement

I am interested in extracting specific moments from time’s continuum and using them as building blocks in a new narrative – the creative of memory as an inventive activity. Pixels are both the medium and the content of my artwork, each pixel carrying with it information from its source, a photographic capture. I use pixels as I would ink or paint in developing an optically layered and visually textural work. The digital camera may be a relatively new artistic tool, but the tradition of photo montage, practiced by artists for decades, is at the foundation of my art making.

Biography

Ellen Scobie was born and raised on Vancouver Island. She attained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from the University of Manitoba where further training in lithography introduced her to the process of fine art printmaking. She continued her art studies in England at the historic London College of Printing. After several years in Spain, Ellen returned to the West Coast where she experimented with a wide variety of media and techniques. All of these influences have shaped her current artistic practice of digital photo montage. The artist has one daughter and lives with her husband in Burnaby, BC.