The WAVE Interlake Artists Studio Tour is rolling out the carpet to art lovers once again this weekend in the latest celebration of its 25th year.
The tour will welcome patrons into studios in Gimli, Teulon, Sandy Hook and more over the course of the weekend. It’s an experience that Winnipeg Beach artist Gayle Halliwell knows all too well as a tour participant of 15 years, but also before that as a visitor.
“I’d been a patron of the WAVE as a person who visited artist studios for almost a decade before I joined and really enjoyed the opportunity to be face to face with people,” she smiles.
That welcoming spirit is something that the artists on the tour extend not only to guests, but also to incoming artists. “The group has been absolutely so welcoming and so encouraging and has elevated, I believe, what I do,” says jewelry artist Laurie Wardrope, who has been a tour participant in the Matlock area for the past three years.
Inspiration from people and land
The encouragement that artists find on the WAVE tour inspires them to continue exploring what is possible in their respective practices throughout the year. Wardrope, who has been making jewelry for 25 years out of everything from resin to zebra mussels (a practice she views as an artistic environmental stewardship), notes that the experience has caused her to reinvent her practice down to its core.
“It inspired me to start making my own beads instead of relying on pieces that I might find in a catalog or at assorted places where you can buy bits and pieces or even find things,” Wardrope says, adding that the encouragement has even inspired her to make larger objects like a table.
“It’s almost like you swim in that water, and so you end up growing like the rest of the tadpoles, so to speak,” Halliwell says. “It comes out in variety ways, the environment in which we live, and the people that we are with.”
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Growing together
The 25th anniversary of the WAVE Interlake Artists Studio Tour has seen the artists take their creations beyond the region to showcase their works in other parts of the province. The group showcased at Winnipeg’s 210 Gallery with the Manitoba Arts Network back in May and have another exhibition lined up at the Gwen Fox Gallery in Selkirk later this year. In these showcases alongside of the usual two tour weekends, the artists have been showing works relating to the theme “Landscape of Change: Journey and Reflection”.
“I think every artist that’s in the show is showing what their past, present and maybe future looks like,” says Wardrope, using her table as an example of how her artistic journey shows a landscape of change.
Halliwell notes that the ripple effects of the WAVE tour are now being felt not just by its artists as they look to the next quarter-century, but in other parts of the province as well with more similar tours cropping up using the tour’s model.
“I can see people being energized by those things – the newer members and the more seasoned members – grasping the energy that that creates to take them to other places,” Halliwell says.
The WAVE Interlake Artists Studio Tour returns on September 5 and 6. More information and hours are available at the tour’s website.