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Regional Artists Michelle Loughery Michelle Loughery is an artist, organizer, and educator. She has worked in the field of community public art for 20 years and has created over 30 large scale murals, working with inter-generational groups, teens, elders, and children. Michelle served as Art Administrator for the Sparwood Arts and Heritage Council for 10 years. There her work included the initiating and facilitating of numerous projects and programs as well as the day to day administrating and coordinating of an extremely high profile, dedicated Community Arts Centre. As well as Murals, Loughery's work includes extensive studies in acrylic, oil and water color as well as bronze sculpture and stained glass. Michelle draws on her rich experiences in rural Canada to portray a wide variety of historic scenes in her murals. She carries the name of the small coal mining town of Michel, B.C., in which she was born and raised. Her rare talent in creating large scale art is an enduring public reminder of Canada's diverse peoples, heros and rich cultural heritage. In addition to accepting commissions for public, corporate and private murals, Michelle offers a unique community art program in conjunction with public art mural assignments. This totally original program enlists young artist and art students in the community as apprentices, and trains them in the techniques of large format art. Raised in a small community where she struggled to find support for her dream to become an artist, Michelle now encourages young Canadians to celebrate their talents and imagination through these mentor ship mural projects. Heritage murals offer an outstanding opportunity to promote community awareness of Canadian culture while offering young talent experience and training not available through traditional educational resources. Loughery specializes in facilitating complex collaborations in which community members work together to articulate a vision of their shared history and values, of differences and difficulties, and of their vision for possible futures. Participants have the satisfaction of creating permanent art works for their community as they develop skills in collective planning and decision making. Heritage murals offer an outstanding opportunity to promote community awareness of Canadian culture while offering young talent experience and training not available through traditional educational resources. The work is an attempt to create "an aesthetics of collaboration," seeing art making as a part of the collective making of meaning which creates social, community consciousness. In recent works, Loughery has examined the monological style of most public art works and has explored how to present public art in which individual voices express varying insights to a common theme. Community Murals by Michelle Loughery
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Artist and Mentor Statement
I want students to experience the fullness of their potential-- artistically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, morally, socially. Adults and children bring complex ideas and a host of life experiences to the mural projects. Our task as mentors, is to create a dialogue with students while we pass onto them the best of the many legacies of culture and knowledge to which we have access at this place and time. I want my participants to experience joy in learning. I want to help to cultivate an appreciation of nuance, of subtle differences of form, color, light, metaphor, meaning.... I want to help develop discipline, the ability to focus, to engage in a complex process.... I want students to see that culture is created and that it can be re-created. I want students to have the power to dream great dreams and the means to accomplish those dreams.
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