Emily van Lidth de Jeude

 

I'm SO excited to finally be installing this immersive show in the community where it began. The first person to volunteer was my father. The next was my brother, and from there my video documentation of people talking about their experiences of home, belonging, and community spread into the wider community, and eventually to the mainland and Vancouver Island. What a massive learning process this was for me!! Not only the technical side of developing ways to intersect stories and landscapes by film, projection, and fabric, but learning to ask questions that promote the sharing of stories we don't often tell. I made many friends while interviewing for this work. And in an extreme stroke of luck I got to develop and exhibit the first iteration of it in Amsterdam! Which was odd, since all of the protagonists of the work are living in Western Canada. But the Dutch audience responded with passion, causing me to realize that it doesn't really matter where we live; feelings of bel...

It's holiday shopping time, which for me means it's almost my birthday... and that is when I finally get to discover what my partner bought for me at the Gibson's Public Art Gallery a few months ago!!! Woohooooo!!! I love supporting other artists, and I love when people support them in my honour. 🧡 So increasingly I'm realizing that my art is also a commodity, and of course I love to be supported in what I do!  People ask me what's for sale. Well... pretty much everything's "for sale", except my soul -- hahaha! But maybe you'd like a list of what's popular. I happily oblige. Here's a selection of things of various prices, to hopefully inspire your gift-giving, or just to fill your own home with some love and thought-provoking interest. To Purchase: Please contact me at emilyvanartist at gmail dot com to arrange for e-transfer (or cash) and pick up or shipping! Of course, if you'd like to visit the studio and see these works in person...

"Escaping the Nest" (detail)  E. van Lidth de Jeude It just hit me that maybe ten years ago I was worried about the rise of misinformation on social media. I saw it once in a while; people posting things from known biased sources, or just stating information they assumed was correct but wasn’t. Extensive fact-checking became more necessary than I had felt it was, before, since even trusted sources seemed infiltrated with presumption and error. Or maybe I was just becoming more aware.  Recently, though, it feels like disinformation is the norm, and complicated with some serious cruelty. On the bigger social media groups I’m a part of (chicken-keeping, canning, foraging, mushrooms, birds, education, etc.) it’s just absolutely normal for somebody to post a question and receive 30–70% wrong answers. It seems people have just become accustomed to stating an uneducated guess as fact. (And seriously — for canning, foraging, mushrooms, chickens, and schooling, this can lead to disast...

As the death-toll from Libya’s storm floods surpasses eleven thousand, and various hurricanes march their ways across the oceans, people all over the world are gearing up to March to End Fossil Fuels, tomorrow. (Find your city’s event on this map .) Not a Thing Between Me and You (detail) … Recent painting by Emily van Lidth de Jeude, in response to Neil Young’s song, “Overhead”. This painting deals with our compulsion to just keep going into an unknown future, together, even when we don’t know we’re not alone. It’s about courage. But what if we can’t march? And even if we can, how are we going to propel this impetus into action? How are we going to actually save our future on this planet? (Let’s face it, we’re not going to another planet, and instead of talking about “our children’s future” now, we’re talking about our own.) We’ve got months or a couple of years to turn this around, and even if we do, storms like this are now here to stay. So what can we do about it? Become r...

I recently did a commission of a local forest painting for two brothers in the Netherlands. They are paying by donation to BC Conservation groups that I recommended. I feel SO wonderful about this whole arrangement that I decided to do a big sale of my work in support of my local Conservancy, which works very very hard to manage, preserve, and educate about our local wildlands. There's really nothing that matters more to the survival of humanity than protecting the ecology of the planet we inhabit, and the Bowen Island Conservancy works so hard to this end that I can't think of a better recipient for the proceeds from my work. The painting that inspired this sale. It's a pair of landscapes for a pair of brothers. Together they make a forest, and the sun shines on them both. Kind of like this sale, which will benefit me (space in my studio!!) AND the Bowen Island Conservancy, whose work protects us all. Please join us! Hopefully the rain will hold off, but if not, it's d...

I sometimes wonder why everything I paint recently, and somehow even the installations I do, gets a clouded overlay. It's oil paint, white fabric, soft white light; whatever. I keep washing everything away into a purposeful obscurity. (Except my portrait of my Ukrainian Grandma releasing her war trauma. For that I made the obscurity first, and she came out of it. That's a strange happening!) Recently I also found out I have cataracts, apparently caused by the various courses of prednisone I've been subjected to over these last 3.5 years of struggling with long COVID. Blah. Great. Not the news you want, as an artist! But even more recently I realized I might be replicating my own clouded cateract vision in my work. Huh. Grandma Frees the Ptarmigan, 2023 I mean, part of me wants to embrace that (since the inflammatory effects of my long COVID also mean cataract surgery is not recommended), but part of me is still looking for a deeper meaning. And the white thing has been goin...

Markus and I got interviewed for our upcoming show! Have a look, below, and once it's playing you can click the YouTube logo in the bottom corner to watch it full screen. One Solar Year April 19 to May 1 at the Hearth Gallery on Nex̱wlélex̱wem/Bowen Island.  The opening celebration will happen on Earth Day, April 22, from 3:30-5pm, and will include an ecology tour at around 4:30. For more information, see also: https://thehearthartsonbowen.ca/news/one-solar-year-04-2023 or https://www.emilyartist.ca/p/one-solar-year.html

I love this!!  So happy to be a part of this great project that puts the art of motherhood into public spaces! That's my work (dis)robe: Maternity Wear you see near the top middle of the spread above. But it's just one of the many, many poignant pieces that are now out spreading the motherhood vibes in Manchester. Currently the project creators are collaborating with Air Gallery to show it in various Manchester locations, but the whole poster series is available for other exhibits as well, so who knows where it will go next! What a fabulous creation.    Do check out their site at procreateproject.com !  All images credit: Procreate Project Archive

Our book is finished! Two copies of One Solar Year will be at the Hearth Gallery as a central part of the One Solar Year show, April 19-May 1, comprised of work by my partner Markus Roemer, my son, Taliesin van Lidth de Jeude Roemer , and myself. Like the show as a whole, this book explores the seasonal, cultural, and biological changes of the year 2022. Local wilderness photos by Taliesin and myself are the foundation for poems that discuss our human connection with each other and our ecology.    My favourite thing about this book is that if you flip through from winter solstice to winter solstice, you see the colour palette of the year go by. It's reassuring to me that this sequence of colour is so familiar -- such a strong part of our collective psyche.    The book is available to purchase at my Blurb store (link below), but it's quite expensive, due to the ever-rising costs of everything, so I'll be doing a group purchase for locals in the spring to...

  What a wonderful time we had putting up the dual-channel installation of w h a t . h o m e ! OK maybe it was a little stressful given the tight timeline, but we made it, and pretty sure we've survived! Here's a little video compilation of the process of installing. You'll see me sitting on the floor doing a video-interview with Rohit Joseph for CBC Radio's weekend morning show, North by Northwest. Here's the fifteen-minute interview , if you'd like to hear it, for as long as it's available online, anyway. It really was a joy to talk to Rohit, and a highlight of my career at this point.   The opening was really incredible for me. Such a huge amount of support from my family, friends and community. I was totally blown away.   Probably the biggest shock for me though was the unexpected appearance of a fabulous kid I once taught in the Netherlands. I haven't seen her in about thirty years, and she, her mother, and her kids now live on the Sunshine Coast, a...