Join our artists-in-residence Miriam Berndt and Phoebe Bei in the studio for an in-person chat about the work they have undertaken during their time at Griffin!

Miriam Berndt is a Plains Cree and Irish woman living in cə̓snaʔəm (so-called Marpole, Vancouver BC), with roots in Kahkewistahaw First Nation and an upbringing on Six Nations of the Grand River territory. Her mixed media art explores themes of generational healing, hybrid identity, and land-based epistemologies through abstract expressions. She specializes in land-based design through a landscape architecture lens.

Phoebe Bei is an emerging interdisciplinary artist whose practice addresses politics of land, cultural memories, and collective identities. Working largely in photographic processes and installations, her research is rooted in critical studies on ‘the image’ and representation. Her work navigates fictional and existing embodiments of land and how land is occupied, manifested and disseminated in our production of place, culture and identity. Currently, she has found fictitious unions between disparate subjects like land, language, affect, and body/bodies constructive in her understanding of self as an inconclusive and often confusing entity. However, it is through an exchange in dialogues—this sifting of what is retained, projected and disposed of that she has found fertile in informing her contemporary conditions.