Photo: still from “legs” (2022), a collaborative film poem by Christine Fellows, Chantel Mierau and Jennifer Still.
The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency gives Manitoban artists time to focus on their work in the beautiful natural setting of Riding Mountain National Park.
The last artist-in-residence for 2024 is Jennifer Still. Ahead of her time in the historic Deep Bay Cabin, Jennifer answered a few of our questions about her work and how she’ll be spending her residency.
MAC: Tell us a little about yourself as an artist and your practice.
Jennifer Still: My poetry is informed by physical labour and beauty. I like expanding my sense of a page to see how much it can hold— not only words, but materials, seeds, shadows, pinholes, collage. I make poems that have a tactile, physical element to their composition, poems that leave a muddy fingerprint on the page! My writing practice is filled with motion, exposed to the elements, tuned to the natural world, and my interior voice. I love porches, screen rooms, breezeways. Liminal spaces that are inside and outside all at once. I am locating the poem, like never before, in my body.
I recently collaborated with Winnipeg artists, Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau, to turn my poem legs into an award-winning short film. It was an extraordinary experience to wear my poem in full voice and costume, to glide through my words at the bottom of a swimming pool!
I am now discovering poetry as a performative art that can be experienced in various media on and off the page. I would love to screen legs for park guests in the Visitor Center’s theatre during my residency.
Tell us about your project — what will you be working on in the Deep Bay Cabin?
I’m working on a fresh series of poems called Garden Dance: poems for movement which will be the core script for my next collaboration, a dance project.
Last summer I worked as a full-time gardener at Assiniboine Park’s English Gardens. I carried a neon pink notebook, filling each page, cover to cover, with plant names, diagrams, observations, insect wings, pressed flowers, leaves. I followed the story of leaf veins, lenticels, blooms, parasites, roots. The inner whisperings of poems. My trowel became my pen. Weeding was editing. The wheelbarrow handles were an extension of my arms. When I looked behind me, the red garden hose wrote a giant “&” in the grass.
During my residency I will compose poems based on the labour & beauty of my gardening experience. I will be writing in motion, in the open air, on the dock, on the cottage porch, in the gardens. I will create a daily practice that involves observing and writing in the perennial and native prairie gardens around the Visitor Centre.
What is your relationship with the park, and what are you most looking forward to exploring?
I discovered Riding Mountain National Park on my first Deep Bay Residency in 2012. I learned how to dive head-first into the lake. This was huge for me. To trust in the depths that one can’t see.
I developed a special relationship with a mourning cloak chrysalis hanging above the doorway of the writing shed. It was there for two years in a row. Was it the same chrysalis, or a new generation? Either way, it felt like the chrysalis was connected to the poems I was writing, a slow transformation of words rearranging themselves with patience, preparing to emerge!
I have since returned to the park every summer with my family, to jump off the dock, listen to the loons at sunrise, and be strangely fascinated by the sight of my own feet suspended and kicking deep in that clear lake water.
How do you hope the park will influence or inspire your project or practice?
I’m excited to write and dream so close to a lake, with wave and wind sounds and the scent of pine needles. I’m excited to see how the sensory experience of being in a forest, writing on a dock, listening to waves and birdsong and wind through tall trees, will guide the rhythm of my poems. I’m also excited to see how the late season garden and the September light will guide me.
What would you like the public and park staff to know about you and your work?
My gardening summer taught me the way we tend to our plants can reveal how we feel about ourselves. In the garden I learn how to reach out from a place closer to my heart—not with control or force, but with a newfound acceptance of “what is.” I will bring this gentle, tactile listening to the creation of my poems and my interactions in the garden. I hope to encounter other gardeners during my stay. I’m particularly interested in botanical terms that overlap with human anatomy (fingerbuds, eyebuds). Gardening and writing are not all that different — both make a mark with a skilled hand.
Anything else you’d like to share with readers and the Riding Mountain National Park community?
I love swimcaps and am learning how to swim the butterfly.
The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency is offered in partnership by the Manitoba Arts Council and Riding Mountain National Park.
Interested in the staying in the Deep Bay cabin? Find out how to apply to the Riding Mountain Artists Residency through the Learn – Residencies grant stream. Apply by January 15, 2025 for a residency in the summer of 2025.
