Exhibition Reception + Festival Launch
Welcome with Robert Joe + Jessica Silvey
September 19, 2025 | Festival Celebration, 6pm
Free, Open to All | Sunshine Coast Arts Center
Exploring the function of fungus and the delicate threads of the mycelium networks of communication and consciousness, Valerie Durant’s work makes visible the invisible connections of diverse collaborations and inclusivity that nourish the forest below the surface. These connections remind us of human interconnectedness with nature, urging us to foster a symbiotic relationship with our environment to protect both ourselves and our ancestors.
Hadis Fard is drawn to the devasted landscapes of clearcuts in Robert’s Creek. For her, forests are not simply collections of trees. They are complex, interdependent systems where vertical diversity -- canopy, understory, root, and soil -- sustains life. When deforestation occurs, this layered structure collapses. The same is true under colonialism: when cultures, languages, and peoples are erased, a vital system of global diversity is severed. Colonial systems not only take land, they rewrite meaning, and extract from the force of life. She invites us to listen again, and to remember as resistance to this erasure.
Since moving to the coast, artist and musician Tegan Ceschi-Smith has been meditating on our relationship and responsibility to the ocean and all of the creatures that live in and depend on it. Her watercolour meditations, created using salt and fresh water from the Salish Sea, are an invitation to explore our environment and our relationships to those we share space with. Her paintings are a discovery of the ever-changing play of light on these incredible ocean-dwelling mammals. They bring those we rarely see into the light.
Giorgio Magnanensi’s West Coast Radians – wood resonators – bring a soundscape of shíshálh elder Robert Joe and master weaver Jessica Silvey’s stories of Sinku and the Salish Sea. Their generous sharing of stories through their lives lived along and with the Salish Sea weave traditions with personal memories, expressing their deep interconnectedness to the shíshálh swiya.