So we're going to have a picnic blanket / lawn chair SOCIALLY DISTANCED IN PERSON LAUNCH of Ariel Gordon and Natalie Baird's Pandemic Papers: Phase One, a beautiful hand-made chapbook from At Bay Press.
We'll be set up on the BACK of the Laura Secord School playground. We'll be close to the Wolseley Farmers Market in the RA Steen CC courtyard, where you can buy market veg and baking and ice cream!
The launch will include readings by Ariel, live drawing by Natalie, and a special edition of Pandemic Bingo with PRIZES!
Bring your parasols and bingo dabbers! We'll have books and broadsides and chapbooks for sale.
PLEASE wear masks and be prepared to observe social distancing guidelines. This will work if we all stay safe!
About Pandemic Papers: Phase One
Through the spring and early summer 2020, Natalie Baird and Ariel Gordon painted and wrote separately and together, working through what it means to live in and through a pandemic.
Natalie and Ariel both artists but they’re also sisters with two decades between them.
Pre-pandemic, they had a draw/write project where they sat at a table and pushed notebooks back and forth. Ariel wrote poems around Natalie’s illustrations. Natalie painted around Ariel’s verses. It was a way to connect as siblings and to collaborate across their disciplines. But once lockdown started, they had to modify their process.
And so, through the first four months of the pandemic, two boxes of paper moved between mailboxes, following social distancing protocols.
The result is Pandemic Papers: Phase One. 75 unbound pages have been collected, printed on specially selected tactile paper, in a handmade folder, made of Canadian handmade artisan paper. Each book includes a saddle-stitched insert discussing the scope of the work. All copies are signed by the author and the artist.
About the Artists
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Gordon also co-edited the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018) and is the ringleader of the National Poetry Month in the Winnipeg Free Press project. Her next book is TreedTalk (At Bay Press, 2020), out September 25.
Natalie Baird is a visual artist, filmmaker, and community-based researcher based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Natalie completed a bachelor of environmental science from the University of Manitoba in 2014, where she explored film-making as a tool for environmental action. Her documentary, animation, and video-installation work has been screened and exhibited across Canada. She has an embedded community practice, working as an arts facilitator and artist-in-residence in drop-in art centres and personal care homes. In 2016 Natalie returned to the University of Manitoba for a master of environment, leading arts-based research projects about the social dimensions of climate change in Nunavut.