Eliza Fernand & Sherry Walchuk: Watery Ghosts

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Eliza Fernand & Sherry Walchuk, "Watery Ghosts," 2021

Watery Ghosts brings together material practices that make space for deeper understandings of the subtleties of love, loss and grief. Sherry Walchuk and Eliza Fernand are subtly attuned to the fragile and fleeting nature of our human bodies, in all of their watery complexities. Their work is playful, ecstatic and tragic, acting as archives of deep feeling and loss. Sherry Walchuk’s drawings and structures investigate internal and external architectures’ while offering suggestions for viewers to dwell in spaces of heightened feeling and bodily sensation. Eliza Fernand’s video works fluidly layers intersecting bodies of research into hydrofeminism and ghosts as a visual ven diagram. Ceramic slip-cast sculptures cluster, standing in for human touch while echoing anecdotes from the video work, others with their own stories to tell.

Eliza Fernand is a video and installation artist who works primarily with space, sound, fabric, and clay. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Sierra Nevada University. Fernand has exhibited her work internationally in solo and group exhibitions, has been the recipient of NEA grants for individuals, and has attended over a dozen artist residencies across the United States. Fernand’s videos offer a handmade aesthetic that touches on subversive subjects to bring to light alternative kinds of intimacy and kinship. In artmaking and in teaching, she aims to provoke an acceptance of loving practices outside of the norm and promote experimentation on all levels.

Sherry Walchuk  lives and works in Mission BC and Montréal QC. She holds a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work has been published in Canadian Art and Border Crossings Magazine, and has been exhibited at numerous artist-run centres and galleries. She has received grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, has attended residencies at the Banff Centre and in Iceland, and has taught Drawing as an Artist in Residence at Concordia University.