As Kellyann Marie traversed Europe on their bike for nine months in 2023, they gathered fabrics along the way—sheets from thrift stores, scraps from clothes, remnants of places ed through. These treasures became the foundation of their quilts, stitched together in what would later become part of the we carry each other exhibition at Union Gallery.
Showing in the Main Space of UG from March 4 to May 10, the exhibition brings together five Queen’s graduate student artists—Marie, Baraa Abuzayed, Alicia Williamson, all PhD students in cultural studies, Jared Augustin, MA ’24, and Erin Rendell, MSc ’26—each exploring the complexities of home, land, and belonging.
Closing out Union Gallery’s curatorial year under the theme home/land, all five artists bring deeply personal narratives to the exhibition, using their respective mediums to explore the tension between rootedness and displacement, memory and transformation.
“I don’t really participate in the idea of home,” Marie said in an interview with The Journal. “I was literally homeless when I made these quilts.”
Suspended from the ceiling, “Well Dang, if ya ain’t just gotta go through it to grow through it” features an intricate quilt stitched with a snake coiled around Marie’s calf, inspired by the time they were living in a primitive skills camp in Florida and a friend’s toe was bit by a poisonous water snake.
The quilt blends earthy tones and layered textures, using a T-shirt Marie found on the side of a highway to create the spots on the snake.
The second quilt, “Oh Mercy, oh bumblefucked,” references a love affair with a Portuguese photographer Marie met on their first day in Europe. They incorporate cyanotype prints of the place where they shared their first kiss and at the centre of the quilt is a bunch of onions, a tribute to the photographer’s childhood nickname, little onion.
Marie’s quilts, both intimate and expansive, embody the transient nature of home.
For Abuzayed, home is both a memory and an act of resistance. Her mixed-media installation incorporates traditional Palestinian embroidery of olive branches, birds, and roots presenting a fragmented imagery of displacement.
“My homeland is not a suitcase. I am not a traveler. I am the lover and the land is the beloved,” Abuzayed said in her artist statement.
Wired headphones connected to an iPod invite visitors to listen to a recording of Abuzayed’s grandparents singing Palestinian folk songs. The recording, taken during a car ride in 2023, is filled with warmth and unfiltered connection.
Extending this intimate exchange beyond her own family, Abuzayed turns the act of listening into an act of witnessing.
As an Anishinaabe-Irish/Settler, Williamson shares a similar commitment to preserving and reclaiming ancestral knowledge. Twirling in between her other creations, Williamson’s “Celestial Bundle Bag” is an intricate expression of Anishinaabe quillwork, a practice that was nearly lost in her family due to colonial disruption and residential schools.
Crafted from birch bark and porcupine quills—which she harvested herself—velvet, beads, and other materials, Williamson’s work is both an homage to her grandmother and great-grandmother, who were quill workers, and an act of reclamation.
Made specifically for this exhibition, Williamson views the bundle bag as a physical manifestation of resilience and cultural continuity. Taking materials straight from the land, various places she’s inhabited, and knowledge learned from community and family , Williamson ensures this ancestral practice isn’t only preserved but actively carried forward.
Just as Williamson turns to the past to reconnect with her ancestors’ quill work, Rendell’s work reminds us that sometimes looking back is necessary to understand the present.
Lining a wall of the gallery is a series of repeat photographs, each capturing the same Arctic landscape almost 50 years apart. Side by side, the images reveal both transformation and endurance—glaciers retreat, rivers shift, but certain features of the land remain unchanged.
As a geography student with a research position at the McGill Arctic Research Station, Rendell was tasked with digitizing photos taken on Axel Heiberg Island from the 1960s and ’70s. It was then, she decided to explore how repeat photography and soundscapes can be used to diversify knowledge production in high Arctic studies.
At first, Rendell set out to document glacial retreat, particularly on Axel Heiberg Island, where the majority of glaciers are thinning or disappearing. However, after taking the first couple photos, she noticed there were more changes to the land than just the glaciers such as vegetation patterns and rock erosion.
“That inspired me to explore more broadly the applications and the knowledge that can come from repeat photography, beyond documenting glacier change,” she said.
Accompanying the photographs are soundscape recordings, allowing visitors to listen to the subtle rhythms of an evolving Arctic. Like Abuzayed’s folk song recordings, these environmental sounds serve as an auditory archive, preserving something that might otherwise fade unnoticed.
While Rendell documents landscapes in flux, Augustin turns inward, examining the body as a site of home, tension, and transformation. His oil pastel works depict entangled figures—arms, legs, torsos overlapping and twisting in ways that blur the line between embrace and struggle.
His large-scale piece, “One Body, Two, Three, Four,” presents figures locked in an ambiguous dance, questioning whether they’re holding each other up or resisting collapse.
For Augustin, the body is not only a personal space but one that’s intrinsically linked to others.
“A lot of people, myself included, have this mistaken idea that we’re somehow separate from the land,” Augustin said. “I carried that idea that our body is the land into my work and how complicated that can be and how much joy it can bring.”
His figures, though abstract, feel deeply familiar, inviting viewers to consider ways in which their own bodies exist in relation to others and the land.
Throughout we carry each other, the artists remind us home is not a fixed place, but something we construct through relationships, memory, and movement with the land as deeply intertwined with these experiences.
Whether stitched into quilts, sung into existence, etched into birch bark, captured in frozen landscapes, or expressed through the movement of bodies, we carry each other in ways both seen and unseen.
Tags
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to [email protected].