ESSENTIAL FIRES FOR COLD PANDEMIC NIGHTS

Essential Fires for Cold Pandemic Nights is a simple project involving a small group of artists coming together in meaningful and safe ways during the hard winter nights of the COVID-19 pandemic. During a time when so much of our collective life is stripped down to what is deemed essential, this project is about making a safe space for the essential need to gather, talk, tell stories, and make sense of things together.

The small group, all living in the local health region (Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph), gather when health regulations allow, so that we can think through the big questions circling this pandemic together. Inspired by the fact that humans have for millennia before us found ways to make it through hard winters, we sit around an fire for warmth as we talk about what it means to be living in this strange and precarious time, the larger disaster inside which this one sits, what our role and responsibilities as artists/makers are right now, and so on wherever the conversation take us.

With Sophia Bartholomew, Karen Houle, Christina Kingsbury, Andrew Maize, Halley Roback, and Fan-Ling Suen