we carry each other
Detail from Kellyann Marie, Well Dang; if ya ain’t just gotta go through it to grow through it, 2024, quilted second-hand and found textiles, applique, ink, ballpoint pen. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Alicia Williamson, Baraa Abuzayed, Erin Rendell, Jared Augustin, Kellyann Marie
Main Space
March 4–May 10, 2025
Opening reception: March 1, 2025, 3pm
Coming together in Union Gallery’s Main Space, Queen’s graduate students Alicia Williamson, Baraa Abuzayed, Erin Rendell, Jared Augustin, and Kellyann Marie present we carry each other, a cross-media exhibition of new artworks. Through this exhibition, the artists share their stories and express their connectedness to the land, their notions of home, and their relationships to beloved ones. Addressing the annual curatorial theme home/land from diverse perspectives, these works carry the artists’ sense of belonging in the face of many challenges—the atrocities of genocide and cultural erasure, displacement and poverty, death and survival, and the false separation between humanity and the land.
Alicia Williamson
ARTIST STATEMENT
Biizaanaagimisin nibi kwe indizhinikaaz. Wiikwemkoong miinwa Wewebijiwong ndoonjiba. Zaashaa nimkii bineshi ndoodem. Anishinaabe Irish kwe ndow.
Alicia Williamson is Anishinaabe-Irish/Settler and a member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. Creation knows her as Calm Water Woman. She grew up in Little Current, Ontario, which is known as the place ‘where the waters go back and forth’. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on the revitalization of Anishinaabe quillwork. Specifically, the stories and making practices that emerge from her familial lines. Alicia’s grandmother, Rita Francis-baa, and great-grandmother, Gertrude Eshkawkogan-baa, both had elaborate and highly skilled quillwork practices. Due to colonization, particularly the impact of the residential school system, this knowledge became disconnected from her family.
BIOGRAPHY
Being an Anishinaabe-Irish/Settler interdisciplinary artist, the art-making of Alicia Williamson is deeply connected to her relationships to her ancestors, land, culture, and communities. Alicia makes with a variety of mediums, particularly porcupine quills, birch bark, beads, and textiles. She comes from a strong lineage of makers.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Miigwetch to my grandmothers, Gertrude Eshkawkogan-baa and Rita Francis-baa, for holding onto their knowledge bundles so I could be here stitching our life ways back together. Their love and strength permeates the boundaries of settler colonialism.
Miigwetch to my non-human relatives, specifically gaag (porcupine), wiigwaas (birch bark), and wiingashk (sweetgrass) for their life and generosity.
Miigwetch to Myna and Theodore Toulouse for their instruction in sewing together my first quillbox. Their continued commitment to quillwork and Anishinaabemowin are powerful. Miigwetch to Akinoomoshin for providing the opportunity for me to participate in gaayik-kemin (quillwork making workshop) in 2022.
Miigwetch to my mom, Karen Francis Williamson and my partner, Matthew Redmond for their enduring support throughout my learning journey. Miigwetch to the beautiful collective of community members, relatives, and makers who continue to nurture the spirit of this work.
Baraa Abuzayed
ARTIST STATEMENT
My homeland is not a suitcase
I am not a traveler
I am the lover and the land is the beloved.
These words were written by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as part of his poem, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound.” I thought of these words as I created this piece. I questioned what it means to create in the midst of genocide and displacement. What is it to have no choice but to carry a suitcase of your whole life before a 2000 lb bomb drops on your head? And what is it to refuse to be a “traveler” or be forcibly displaced? Is it death? To die on one's own land, is it to become the tree of the land? To love your land is to become part of it and to grow tall and strong like the olive trees that our ancestors cared for and loved.
When all words and creations feel futile, one must know that every act becomes an urgent one. This is my attempt to make meaning in the midst of fragmentation and steadfastness, of dispossession and return, of death and rebirth. I invite you to reflect with me.
The motifs are inspired by traditional embroidery (tatreez). The olive branch motif on the left, the bird symbols flying around to witness, and the roots that are invisible but carry life forward.
… I honour those who refused …
BIOGRAPHY
Baraa Abuzayed is a Palestinian scholar currently based in Katarokwi Kingston. She's a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies, and her current research focuses on themes of social reproduction, home, family, fragmentation, and survival. Through her research-creation practice, Baraa incorporates mixed media installation using textiles. Her work often involves incorporating traditional Palestinian embroidery techniques and patterns by blending different mediums. She often uses literary meanings along with memories and stories gifted to her by her grandparents and parents when making and creating — through academia and art.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my family, Nisreen, Jamal, Janna, Hayat, Mohamed and thank you Youssef, you all helped me dream this to life. Thank you to my maternal and paternal grandparents for telling me their stories, even when it’s painful to speak. And my deepest gratitude, particularly, to the women and men who came before me and created stories of life through their art, and passed them on and on and on and on. Finally, thank you Samia Ayyash for being my mentor and teaching me the art of Tahriri (couching).
Erin Rendell
ARTIST STATEMENT
In 2023, I had the immense fortune of spending one month at the McGill Arctic Research Station (MARS) on Umingmat Nunaat, Nunavut. This land hosts glaciers, mountains, diapirs (salt domes), rushing meltwater streams, and more. While there, I conducted repeat photography and soundscape recordings and considered the “who” associated with these media: photographers, observers, nature, and technology. These media, and what is learned from them, are the result of human and non-human actors interacting. Rather than telling you what to take from these media, I encourage you to be with the land through them, and to develop knowledge about this environment that is specific to your interactions. You may see change, you may see things stay the same. You may hear movement, you may hear life. Here, we carry the memories of Umingmat Nunaat, of the people and technology that have worked there. While interacting with these media, I invite you to record your own voice and share what you observe, wonder, or resonate with. These recordings are expressions of collaborative learning and knowledge… an homage to the interconnectedness of our human, natural, and technological worlds across time.
BIOGRAPHY
Erin Rendell is a graduate student in geography from Belleville, Ontario. For much of her life, she has worked with nature to create art, from painting on fences with mud to casting racoon footprints with plaster. During busy fieldwork seasons, she reconnects with art through photography, and enjoys the time spent being attentive to the land’s features and processes. In her undergraduate degree, she explored how repeat photography and soundscapes could be harnessed to diversify knowledge production and expand knowledge dissemination in High Arctic sciences. Now in her Master’s degree, she is investigating an ice engineering intervention to strengthen winter trail ice crossings in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. She engages with themes of accessibility and positionality in cryosphere studies, and is committed to the decolonization of Arctic research.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to extend innumerable thanks to Dr. Laura Thomson, Dr. Laura Jean Cameron, and Dr. Christopher Omelon for welcoming me into their research and lives. I would also like to thank my parents and partner for filling my life with love, wonder, and encouragement. Finally, thank you to the land for extending your knowledge to those near and far. I am excited for all that I have yet to learn from you.
Jared Augustin
ARTIST STATEMENT
Where does this body end?
Who is not joined with me in this space?
How can I let them in?
What has taken their place?
When I was a little kid, I never wondered about these things.
And now, I find myself confused about where I am in all of this. I am left dumb in the disillusionment that my skin is the border of my body. Nowhere to go, nothing to be. Still, I must be deeply invested in this stumbled-into story. So, my body grows into this story; rooted, entangled, and inseparable from other bodies. It is a messy ordeal.
Seen as a home, I want to dwell in my body with peace, joy, and contentment. In this way, pain and grief can pass through with ease.
At the same time, I am trying to lose my mind. And I hide in my off-centred shadowed places. Estranged from myself and stuck north inside my head. There I have no answers. There I am blocked from the truth of my naked vulnerability. I forget I was brought into this world needing others, through others. And so, the arms of my home reach out to take rather than to give. There I am incarcerated, closed in by my own (something).
Am I being carried or confined? Is this protection or imprisonment? What do I need to give up to be liberated from these walls?
This series is composed of/on repurposed material from my family home, the same material used to build my family home. Internal, interpersonal, familial, and planetary relationships through the lens of the body is central to this work. It is none other than an offering to you of my confusion and incongruence in this moment, as we continue to slip and dance through time before we die.
BIOGRAPHY
Jared Augustin has been practicing art with more consistency for the past year but has had lifelong interest in creative endeavors. His combined background in kinesiology, sports, art, spirituality, and faith has led him to a deep curiosity about the holistic nature of the body and heart.
Through the guidance and support from professors in the Queen’s Cultural Studies department, Jared was able to attain a master in cultural studies with a focus on critical prison studies and restorative justice. This interest has brought Jared to support and counsel youth in the Hastings County area who have come in contact with police or the justice system.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to my mother and father and two brothers, Dolleen Manning, Erin Burns, Scott Rutherford, Lisa Guenther, Taryn McKenna, and Megan Goodall.
Kellyann Marie
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work lives at the crossroads of long-distance bicycle touring, inherited skills, and queerness. Something stitched together with bits of poverty, and grit (the second hand heres & theres).
I quilt, quilt as a synonym for painting (praise be the matriarch in me). I'm telling a personal narrative indicative of the creativity of making do. I work with found materials and figurative imagery, following in the footsteps of the women I carry with me (Gramma made do with scraps). These materials and symbols speak to the complex nature of survival and home, especially when both feel like fragile things. Using the figure allows me to anchor these stories in the body (read: my body).
I am romanticizing the nuance in Southern U.S folklore and the semiotics of Florida — the t-shirt I found on the side of the highway becoming the spots of a water moccasin.
This is a lifelong collection of second-hand (in that there’s a proverbial hand to hold in objects from having once been held), tender, and Southern (in cahoots with garbage to tell a lifelong joke). The resulting work are textiles layered with personal narrative — always centering the mark of the hand, to be thankful to have hands and that they would be so sweet as to leave a kiss on everything they might touch.
BIOGRAPHY
Kellyann Marie is a queer transient responding to poverty and seeking a life in the in-between by creating pockets of home, through community, through sex work, and through honoring the ephemera found there. By celebrating the second hand, they work to connect queer life-art-home-godliness. Navigating life in a tent raised in the Southern U.S and born in the jagged rocks of Ktaqmkuk, Kellyann embraces oversharing and tenderness to honor the handmade skills that make life in poverty possible. The resulting work is paintings and textiles layered with personal narrative, meeting functional objects glorious in their usefulness — always centering the mark of the hand (to be thankful to have hands and that they would be so sweet as to leave a kiss on everything they might touch).
They are currently working towards a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, hold a SSHRC funded MFA from Memorial University of Newfoundland, a BFA from Florida State University, and have exhibited nationally and internationally.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to extend a special thank you to the water moccasin that bit my dearest friend’s toe clean off — for the metaphor of poverty and the limitations of the South that took place in front of my very eyes; and another to the overflowing trailer park ashtray of Marlboro Reds that raised me.