Spend a day at the beach with Jane Dunlop-Stevenson for Hands Across the Sands, a fundraiser for the Queens County Food Bank on Sunday at Summerville Beach. (Rick Conrad

You can help turn a day at the beach into a work of art this weekend, and raise some money for a local charity.

Liverpool artist Jane Dunlop-Stevenson is organizing Hands Across the Sands: Art with Heart for the Food Bank on Sunday at 1 p.m. on Summerville Beach.

The idea is to draw 30-foot tall stick figures on the beach at low tide. You make a $20 donation to the Queens County Food Bank for each figure. And Dunlop-Stevenson and other volunteers will help you bring your beach art into the world.

“It started with a gentleman saying to me it would be neat to see people being drawn on the beach,” Dunlop-Stevenson said in a recent interview.

“And that led me to think of a picture of all these stick people and what we could do with it and it just evolved into let’s charge some money and help out the food bank and create this great picture.

“The original goal was to draw 150 30-foot stick figures at $20 a piece which would then (be) $3,000 to the food bank. We’re at a third of that right now. So that’s really good. I’m pleased with that. Just to envision 77 30-foot stick drawings is incredible across the beach, all holding hands, … with their feet in the water. It’ll be really neat to see the tide coming in and touching their toes.”

After everybody has drawn their figures, Dunlop-Stevenson will take drone footage of the whole scene and post it.

This is the first time she’s created sand art at Summerville with so many other people. But she’s a veteran virtuoso at creating striking short-term sand art.

Probably her best known work was a 120-foot-by-60-foot tribute to Olympic shot putter Sarah Mitton before this summer’s games. That one featured an 85-foot Eiffel Tower, a Canadian flag and the Olympic rings.

Dunlop-Stevenson created this tribute to Sarah Mitton this summer at Summerville Beach. (Jane Stevenson photo)

She’s also recreated the logo for the Liverpool International Theatre Festival. And she’s taken small groups to Summerville to create mandalas and other images.

But Sunday’s event promises to be her biggest group effort yet. She and some other volunteers will sketch out the heads of all the stick figures ahead of time. 

And participants just have to bring their own rakes to help give their pieces texture, so that they show up against the smooth sand.

“And they will rake the head and choose their design however they want it, however simple or dressed up they want their little person to be, it’s totally up to them. No perfection is necessary. If you have your little picture drawn and you know what you want to put in the sand, it will probably take you 20 minutes maybe to draw a stick figure. So it’s very possible to draw a few.

“Nothing has to be perfect. It’s all just for fun and to see this really cool art.”

Dunlop-Stevenson has set up a Facebook event, which includes a link to a Google registration form. You can go by yourself or get a team of five together. 

And if the weather doesn’t co-operate this weekend, they’ll try it again on Nov. 30. Look for updates on their Facebook event Hands Across the Sands: Art with Heart for the Food Bank.

“Bring your rakes, find some pictures online, bring your 20 bucks and bring your friends. … We can always be warm at the beach.”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

QCCR acknowledges the support of the Community Radio Fund of Canada’s Local Journalism Initiative.

Velta Vikmanis’s art exhibit, Chaos to Calm, is on now at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. (Rick Conrad)

As many others did during the pandemic, Velta Vikmanis and her husband were looking to move from the crush of the city to the calm of the country.

“With the pandemic I think everybody kind of did an inventory and reprioritizing of life,” the Liverpool resident says. “And so we were very fortunate that we came to Nova Scotia. Neither one of us had ever been here or visited. We drove around for two and a half months and came across the South Shore and fell in love with it.”

That examination of where you’ve been and where you end up is a central theme of Vikmanis’s art exhibit, now on at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. 

Chaos to Calm has its official opening with a reception on Friday at 6:30 p.m. It runs for the month of May. 

“Coming from Ontario, from a large metropolitan city of 4.2 million people and constant traffic and people on top of each other to this slower, calmer pace. … The show itself is an opportunity for me to do a kind of retrospective.”

Vikmanis and her husband Peter arrived in Liverpool in November 2021, part of the influx of people who moved to Queens County in the midst and the aftermath of the pandemic.

Before that, they lived in Toronto for 16 years, where Vikmanis worked full time. She pursued her bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpture and installation at OCAD University as a part-time student.

“The show is really a reflection of things I did in the past, things that I did in school and an opportunity for me to get back into a daily practice and reflection of my art,” she says.

“I’ve never been what I consider an artist who makes work for a living. I’ve always done it for myself and if it happens to inspire or spark joy in someone else and they appreciate it and want to purchase it, great. That just buys me more art supplies.”

While Liverpool has served as a respite from the bustle of a bigger city, it also allowed her to rediscover her passion for art. After going to school, working full time and living through a pandemic, Vikmanis says she was burnt out after years of what she calls “forced creativity”.

“It was signing up to do this show that actually forced me to do an assessment, an inventory, catalogue, and actually create new works. Because prior to that, I went through a period of no creativity and just putting it on the shelf.”

When artist Velta Vikmanis moved to Liverpool, she was inspired by Queens County’s beaches. (Rick Conrad)

Vikmanis’s show features an eclectic mix of styles, media and topics. From photography in the Azores or on the beaches of Queens County to painting to sculpture, she says it represents 20 years of work.

The centrepiece of the show is Vestige Echo, her thesis project at OCAD. It is a paper-based sculpture that consists of literal pieces and mementoes of Vikmanis’s life, quilted together and hung in the window. A metronome ticks on the windowsill behind it. 

Her parents had been packing up her childhood home in Minneapolis. They started to send her boxes of her old report cards and other keepsakes they collected over the years.

At the beginning of the pandemic, her father died. And that spurred Vikmanis to go through all of the memorabilia from her parents and from her own collection. 

“It was this whole very strange experience of having to mourn and grieve from afar. So that’s when I started gathering and looking through all the things I had collected.”

She tore everything into smaller pieces, ordered them into boxes by the weight of the paper and stitched them together according to how she picked them up out of each box.

It took her 24 weeks to complete the original eight-by-10-foot installation piece. What’s on exhibit at the Astor is a much smaller, but no less compelling, version.

“It was liberating. Certain things, you put them away and you don’t really ever really pull them back out, do you? So the fact that I was deliberate in looking at every single item, reminiscing about it, but the fact that I could have that moment and that time with that person, with that event, with that lived experience but then pass it along. For the Vestige Echo, hopefully (people) find something in it that triggers something in them.”

“It’s fun to experience it with somebody who has no idea who I am and who these people are and someone who’s present to have that shared memory. It triggers something really fun.”

Vikmanis says she loves finding beauty in the mundane. 

“At the end of the day, I’m still drawn to the ordinary. I”m not somebody who’s very gifted in realism. I can’t paint in a realistic manner. I’ve never been interested in that.”

Vikmanis jokes that since she moved to Liverpool, she’s worked almost everywhere. She now works at Main and Mersey on Main Street, and she volunteers with QCCR on its board of directors. She is also the host of two shows on the station. 

She says she’s looking forward to the opening reception on Friday, to hearing what people think of her work and to meeting other artists from Queens County.

“This is my last stop. I’m not going anywhere. Liverpool is my home now. I love all the people here and getting to know everybody. It’s a great opportunity to meet people and engage with the artist community and to meet folks that I haven’t come across yet. For me, it was that, OK I’ve transitioned, I’ve moved, I’m settled in, I’m truly calm now, so now I need to get back into that practice, and this was that kickstart to get back into that practice of thinking about,, OK what am I going to create next?”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

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Photo courtesy Stephanie Sereda

An entrepreneur is moving their idea to support local artisans from Liverpool to Hunt’s Point in time for the Christmas season.

Stephanie Sereda had intended to open an artist’s collective shop as part of her plan to buy the United Church in Liverpool.

When that sale fell through, she began looking for a new location and landed in Hunt’s Point.

Sereda says the spot she’s found is ideal to capture the attention of shoppers during the holidays.

“Picture a holiday, like a Hallmark holiday shop downtown on those little whimsical downtowns, that’s what it looks like. It’s all beautifully festive and then we’re also going to have coffee, tea or mulled cider and we have Queens Coast trading company doing our beautiful teas,” said Sereda. “Also, we’re going to have desserts, so cupcakes and cakes and rum balls and sugar cookies and so they can sip and stroll and just get caught up in the spirit of Christmas.”

Sereda wants to support artists by giving them another venue to sell their work without needing to be present which is why she opened Hunt’s Point for the Holidays.

After putting out the call on social media offering space to artisans the pop-up shop features the talents of 26 artists from the region and across the Atlantic provinces.

“Part of me thinks I’m a little bit crazy and the other part of me thinks, well, we’ll just throw it out there and see. It’s unbelievable because I’ve sold out of vendors,” said Sereda. “That was my biggest fear, opening up a shop and not having anything in it.”

Sereda says she still gets calls from people wishing she had opened the Liverpool location.

While she is disappointed she couldn’t make it work, the pop-up shop is a version of what she had in mind for the United church.

“It was quite crushing because I felt we were so welcomed. The committee that was in charge of the decommissioning process and getting the right person in there, they were so embracing of the idea, and I think it was a perfect alignment with what they had envisioned,” said Sereda. “But you know, in a perfect world at the end of the day, because I have such a high bar of what I want to deliver if I couldn’t financially pull it off it was just best to not, you know? And I would hate to have started it and not have been able to follow through and then had to sell it or something.”

Sereda says the Hunt’s Point for the Holidays pop-up shop will be a good pilot and a fresh opportunity to see if there is an appetite for a venue like this in Queens.

“My hope and dream is to be able to ultimately land on a venue where I can do multipurpose things like this but also have, like I’m a foodie too, so to have really nice cultivated food and connectivity and engagement and experiential things for people in the community.”

Hunt’s Point for the Holiday will be open every Saturday and Sunday leading into Christmas beginning this weekend.

More information can be found on their Facebook page.

E-mail: edhalversonnews@gmail.com
Twitter: @edwardhalverson

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