What is your relationship with your mother like? With your grandmother? With your aunt or daughter? We all have generational relationships and knowledge that have been passed along and gifted to us from the women in our life. Whether that be sewing, make-up tips, family traditions, where the best spots for blueberry picking are, what not to wear on a first date, family drama, or how to properly shuffle a deck of cards.
How do we navigate all of that knowledge? How does it help us? How does it inhibit us? Our relationships with the knowledge that the many matriarchs of our family have passed down are one of the first ways we learn how to navigate the patriarchy and the world.
tell them from me is an exhibition that examines the complexities of matrilineal relationships, knowledge, and domesticity present in Atlantic Canada. Together, artists Emily Hayes, Ashley Hemmings, Ann Manuel, Alana Morouney, and Sabrina Pinksen utilize textiles, painting, and interdisciplinary installation to portray the gentle, warm, and at times frigid nature of mother-daughter experiences, and the trauma and healing that happens within them.
Emily Hayes is an interdisciplinary artist from Goulds, Newfoundland. Emily’s practice is heavily based in photomechanical printmaking, textiles, and installation. Her practice deals with themes of home, memory, and transgenerational trauma, investigating societal tropes of normalcy and the nuclear family.
Ashley Hemmings is a visual artist and arts administrator based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Using play and humor as methodology, Ashley’s practice combines locally rooted craft processes with other media such as video, installation, writing, and collecting. Their practice considers craft in the contexts of environmental anxiety, community, and queerness.
Ann Manuel’s multimedia practice embodies themes of daily life, relationships, and community. Newfoundland born, she has been a visual artist, arts educator, and advocate for over thirty years. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Alana Morouney (they/she) is a textile artist and sculptor in Mi’kma’ki/Sackville, New Brunswick. Alana’s interactive sculptures use simple mechanics and materials that draw the hand to deliver unexpectedly pleasant outcomes. Familiar materials and mediums carefully clothe subtext with tenderness. Through various media, Alana’s work explores themes of community, communication, parenthood, and dreams.
Sabrina Pinksen is a writer and painter from Wild Cove, White Bay. Her written and visual work operates to challenge the erasure of Newfoundland’s outport communities and has appeared in Riddle Fence, Horse Shoe, and Newfoundland Quarterly. She has received the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts and Letters Poetry Award and is the most recent winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award.
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We gratefully acknowledge the support from Canada Council for the Arts, ArtsNL and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador for our 2024 FAMILY Programming
