Who is that artist in the window? Residency program sculpts rising talent

If you’ve walked downtown Midland recently, you may have seen Sarah Hancock through the window at the Midland Cultural Centre.

That’s because she’s the latest Quest Art School and Gallery’s artist-in-residence.

Sponsored by the Rotary Club of Midland, the new program Art is Love Artist-in-Residence is using the main floor space previously occupied by the gift store at the corners of King and Elizabeth streets.

Hancock is the third of six artists to hold the title this year, bringing her art and hosting workshops over the six-week residency.

The 21-year-old Angus resident graduated this spring with a bachelor of fine art from York University. She previously attended Nottawasaga Pines Secondary School, which she notes has a very good art program including pottery and glass-fusion making.

Hancock describes herself a a contemporary eco-artist.

“Usually artists define themselves by the medium. I can’t do that because I do everything,” she says in the room surrounded by her large watercolour of a Great blue heron, an acrylic self-portrait, yarns, fungi, dried flowers, branches and animal bones. Grounding is the name of her new self portrait, face level with the soil with ants in the foreground.

“It’s a piece about eco-anxiety,” she says. 

What she means is that young people today have anxiety about bringing children into the world in the midst of an environmental crisis. She worries though that people who are withholding having children are then not passing along their eco-conscience to the next generation.

“This piece is exploring those concepts and internal struggles. It’s about my conflict with that idea.”

Her large, detailed painting of a great blue heron is the first of a trio of paintings that shows less of the bird in the second painting. The third painting details only the eyes and claws.

It’s meant to be a political statement.

“The amount of the great blue heron that is left (in the third painting) represents the amount of wetlands left in Ontario, so it’s showing the decline of wetlands, the environment the great blue heron needs to survive,” Hancock says.

Hancock tries to do two things with her art. The first is to get people to engage with nature. The second is to create a confrontational space so that the viewer questions how they interact with nature and gives thought to the future of the natural environment.

“I’m also very interested in the intersection of nature, science, art and femininity,” she said.

Over the past centuries, the patriarchal world shut women out of being scientists and artists, she explained. The result is a world framed by men’s work, that shapes the narrative in the world we know.

“How would our knowledge be different if science were led by women or Indigenous peoples?” she asks. “How would our society be different and how would the environmental crisis would be different if science and knowledge hadn’t have been gate kept by men throughout history?

“It’s a lot for me to explain, which is why I do it with my art,” Hancock says.