Presentation

Becoming Water Student Art Catalog

Becoming Water Documentary

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Our co-presentation will describe two collaborative projects that connected research with teaching and learning to demonstrate how art and science are complimentary within transdisciplinary, community-engaged scholarship. Both projects used visual strategies for transformative student and community engagement, immersing participants in multi-sensory experiences that connected water with art and socio-political change.

Faculty and student artists and scientists, together with traditional and local knowledge holders, sought co-production of embodied experiences of environmental change.  Those involved in the projects were encouraged to think about and sense the environmental impacts that have befallen Canada’s large in-land freshwater deltas, home to traditional cultures that have witnessed a precipitous decline in the productivity of their socio-ecological systems. The two projects are 1) the Delta Dialogue Network Display – an interactive exhibit that used sculpture and multi-media materials to convey scientific and Indigenous knowledge in multiple languages and formats and was displayed in nine community venues and 2) the Becoming Water course, documentary film and exhibition catalogue - a studio fine arts class that permitted students to interact with artists, scientists and traditional knowledge holders about the challenges of managing freshwater systems in the Anthropocene. Each project will be described drawing on principles of co-design, community-engaged art practices and social learning.

Susan Shantz is a mixed-media, sculpture and installation artist who has exhibited her work across Canada and internationally. Recent projects which foreground her connection to place and acknowledge her presence as a guest on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis, include the community-engaged, partnership projects with the Saskatoon Tribal Council (The Child Taken) and the School of Sustainability and the Environment (Delta Days). She co-designed and taught the interdisciplinary course, Becoming Water, with Graham Strickert connecting art with science. Her multi-media art response to the Saskatchewan River, Currents, will be exhibited in that watershed at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, SK and the Esplande Arts & Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, AB in 2021. She is Professor of sculpture at the University of Saskatchewan and was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.

Graham Strickert’s community-engaged research seeks to understand how people think about and use water.  His work considers multiple ways of knowing through collaborations between artists, scientists and community partners. He acknowledge relationships and knowledge expanded from working with people from the Williams Treaty, Treaty 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11. His work has taken him across much of Turtle Island, but he currently lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  He served as a knowledge entrepreneur on the collaborative design process for the exhibition, Delta Days, and co-taught, with Susan Shantz, the interdisciplinary course, Becoming Water. Strickert is Assistant Professor in the School of the Environment and Sustainability, a founding member of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. In 2014, he received the U of S Award for Distinction in Outreach for Public Service. He is currently co-applicant on six Global Water Futures programs funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.