Emily van Lidth de Jeude

On my shelf is this old can of cocoa. It says "Droste" and gives a weight "For Eng. and the Colonies". For me, this can of cocoa carries more than 1lb of memories and warnings. When I was in my early teens I went to the kitchen of our double-wide trailer, stood at the upper extension of my tip-toes, and slid this red and blue metal can off our harvest-yellow fridge. It had been there as long as I could remember, and I'm not sure why this day, of all others, I finally made hot chocolate for myself, but I did. And since I'd looked in that can many times, I knew where to find my ingredients.  Maybe fifteen minutes later I sat on the couch, fully proud and enjoying my first self-made hot-chocolate. I found something crunchy in my mouth and, already a fan of chocolate-covered coffee beans, I crunched away at the small bean and said, "aw, Mum! You got your coffee beans in the cocoa."  "I can't imagine how," she said, disinterested. And I be...

1996: Emily van Lidth de Jeude working with children to cover a formerly-neo-nazi-decorated wall in the Netherlands with a kid-designed mural. The child in this photo is now a professional artist living in Gibsons, BC, and still makes meaningful public art to improve her community. Open letter to Bowen Island Municipal Council, Mayor and CAO: Dear Mayor, council members, and CAO,  I write in response to the voiced concern about our "art fund". This relatively small fund is an essential aspect of our community's future prosperity. First of all, to get the obvious out of the way, the commonly-held belief that artists should volunteer their time (and often materials) to produce public art is absurd, for the same reason we'd never expect contractors to build our public buildings without pay, and donate supplies. Artists have bodies and families that need to be fed and housed just like the other contracto...

The Harvest series was a series of 17 Instagram posts created over the course of the weeks before and after my mother's death in 2024. Since I've stopped using Meta platforms for political/ethical reasons, I'm re-posting one of the Harvest entries, here. Pappa built this shed in 1983, when I was seven. With his confidant hands he cut the trees on this land, bucked them up, and built a whole life for us, this building being one of the first big things. He used logs for a foundation, and built a frame of scrap wood and home-milled beams and planks. He used a simple froe to cut hundreds of cedar shakes for the roof, and when he was finished he installed the headboard from my brother’s bunk-bed as a ship’s wheel at the end of the hayloft, and he added a little electric propeller to the front door, so we could pretend we were flying a plane. My brother and I and all our friends slept many nights in the hayloft, convinced there weren’t any spiders, by night, even though by day th...