Carol Lynn Gilchrist & Wendy Meeres | Landmarks: A Sense of Place

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Left: Wendy Meeres, "Lacombe’s Flat Iron Building," 2022. Right: Carol Lynn Gilchrist, "A Sense of Place," 2016

Left: watercolour. Right: watercolour. Courtesy of the Gallery.

Local artists Carol Lynn Gilchrist and Wendy Meeres explore the built and natural environments around Central Alberta that make this place home. Each finding a personal connection through stories and feelings associated with being present in that place.

Wendy Meeres was born and raised in Red Deer, Alberta. Art has always played an important role in her life. Her work has focused on pottery, painting and lampwork glass beads.

Her pottery was primarily raku. She did thrown and sculptural works that sold in Western Canada. In 2011 she made a choice to move away from the pottery and focus on the painting and glass bead making. Her glass beads are colourful bits of glass that are then made into jewelry or sold as single beads.

Her paintings are works in water-based media, she combines printmaking and image transfers of her own photographs. The paintings may be mixed media or watercolour.

Her current work is often inspired by her travels and the streets of Central Alberta. She has always been drawn the details of historical buildings wherever she goes. Newer structures lack the character and don’t seem to be built to last the test of time. Canada is such a new country that we need to preserve the historical buildings we have.

Carol Lynn was always drawing as a child, however her first interest was in architectural design and drafting and considers her formal training as her starting point on her artistic path. Starting in 2007, she took watercolours on her summer vacations, and loved the immediacy of the medium. Always looking to improve, she enjoyed learning from library books, life drawing and weekend art classes, and courses in the Visual Arts Diploma at Red Deer College (now Polytechnic).

She has served on two arts organization boards, while being an active member, and was featured in many group shows, both locally and provincially. In January of 2021, she was juried into the Alberta Society of Artists, and in September she opened Riverlands Studio and Gallery in downtown Red Deer.

She continues to explore themes of land, water, and the impact of human development in her art practice, and often plays with emotion and the memory of place to convey her emotional attachment to the land.