Artists

Artists carriers of Gestare Art and Practices

In the fall of 2021 the artist collective ritually opened the movement of Gestare to be taught and practiced
by others. If you are interested to learn more about Gestare Art Practices and Teachings contact us.

Nané Ariadne Jordan is a mixed-media artist working in photography, textiles and performance art. Her artwork explores notion of the body, nature/culture, place, inspiriting life processes and biophilia (love of the Earth and interconnecting life forms). She has a working background in lay midwifery that informs her research, writing and artistic practices. She inquires into birth and its meaning for women’s embodied experience, and the larger implications of birth and birth-giving within philosophy and feminist theory.

Nané has a PhD (Curriculum and Instruction) from the University of British Columbia, an MA (Women’s Spirituality), New College of California, and a BFA (photography), University of Ottawa. Her doctoral research co-explores the lived experiences of seven women, including herself, who are faculty or student alumni within an innovative graduate degree program in Women’s Spirituality. She engages arts-based research methodology through narrative, auto/biographic, life writing inquiry methods—visual and written artworks become the dreaming, aesthetic consciousness of her inquiries. Her artwork has been exhibited in Canada and the US; her essays and poems are published in journals and book chapters.

Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, educator, writer and independent curator. An Associate Professor in Art Education Emerita at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, she teaches art as a relational inquiry process. Her arts-based Ph.D. in Art Education (08), from The University of British Columbia, focused on women, ritual, spiritual leadership, collaboration, and restorative and transformative learning. Her MA in Education (04), also at UBC, inquired into the body as a trans-performative site of text and knowing. She holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Calgary (93) and a BA in Sociology and Art History from the University of Alberta (86). She is co-founder of Studio M* (2017-) A collaborative research creation lab intersection arts, culture and healing in Calgary Alberta. She is a co-founding member of the Gestare Art Collective (2009-21).

Her solo and collaborative art and performance rituals have been exhibited and performed in Canada, and in the US, since 1991. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta and Gallery 3342 in at Southern Illinois University in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her articles on arts-based research have been published in numerous journals and book chapters, and her art has been published in journals and poetry books, as well as on book, journal, and CD covers. In 2015 she published a co-edited book with Routledge entitled Arts Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching with Susan Walsh and Carl Leggo. She is series editor with Springer Press for both Studies in Arts-based Educational Research and Briefs in Art-Based Educational Research and co-editor of Artzein: Arts and Teaching Journal, an open access journal. Go to barbarabickel.ca to contact her and see her full personal website.

Photo Credit Roberto Martinez

Medwyn McConachy is a multi-disciplinary artist working with installation, performance, textile, writing and photography. Medwyn's work evolves through her practice of arts based research wherein she examines the intersections and influences informing cultural practices and human/more than human relationships with a focus on place-finding in her home environment. Medwyn's co-writing has been published in MIRCI Journal Spring/Summer 2011 'Gestating Art in the Matrixial Labyrinth'; Liminal Spaces and Call for Praxising a volume in Curriculum Pedagogy 2013 'The Nap-in as a Matrixial Curricular Intervention'; and Creating Together, 2015 'Wombwalks: Re-attuning with the m/Other'. Medwyn’s work has been installed and exhibited at Artscape Gibraltar Point, Toronto Islands, Ontario; at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC; North Island College Comox Campus; and local coffee houses in the Comox Valley. She lives on the unceded traditional Lekwungen territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt people in Victoria BC. Medwyn is a co-founding member of Gestare. Go to medwynmcconachy.com to see her full personal website.

Cindy Lou Griffith is a documentary filmmaker, writer, visual artist and mental health activist. Her art practice manifests as self-directed research utilizing autoethnography to document what she has named a symbiote consciousness; whereupon, the emergence of a conversant speaker is documented. This symbiote other offers her a lens - an objective eye and ear by which she is lifted into a discrete world to tell a story of Her.

Cindy Lou is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.