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Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, educator and independent curator. An Assistant Professor in Art Education and Women Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Bickel currently teaches courses in art education and studio art. Her arts-based Ph.D. in Art Education from The University of British Columbia, Canada focused on women, ritual, spiritual leadership, collaboration, and restorative and transformative learning. It was awarded the Arts Based Educational Research Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (ABER SIG) in 2009. Her MA in Education at UBC, inquired into the body as a site of knowing -- performing itself as text, and was awarded the ABER Thesis Award in 2005. She holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Calgary and a BA in Sociology and Art History from the University of Alberta. Go to this link for full Curriculum Vitae!
Photo Credit Eva Tihanyi
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Her art and performance
rituals have been exhibited and performed in Canada since 1991. Her articles on arts-based inquiry and a/r/tography have been published in numerous journals and book chapters. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Performance rituals have accompanied many of her exhibitions since 1995. In 2002 she began video documenting her performance rituals and creating video art narratives. Since 1992, she has worked with the collaborative process in her powerful figurative art with women, children and men. Not satisfied with the traditional artist/model relationship she has evolved an art-making process, which incorporates the models as co-creators. |
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ARTIST STATEMENT
Uncovering the knowledge of the body and drawing that expression into full visibility has led
my creative journey thus far. Working non-traditionally within a traditional art form I withhold
the artist’s colonizing gaze and invite the body to speak from its own center. Through that
invitation I attempt to tap into the unending resource of the erotic, which the late poet
Audre Lorde defines as an assertion of the lifeforce:of creative energy empowered.
Engaging a traditional studio practice of creating mixed media drawings and collages on wood allows
me to physically enter a research process. Each art piece that I create is a relational journey between
the subject/co-creator, the surface/landscape/mindscape and the art medium. My studio practice, fed by a
relationship with collaborative models/cocreators, has led to the creation of performance rituals that
take place within gallery spaces.
Reading and representing the body as a contested site of knowledge calls for ongoing exploration.
Through collaboration with others, my art expands beyond personal experience to collective social
ritual that draws upon and honours all aspects of the creative process.
Please go to my favourite links page.
Barbara with work from Illuminatus at the Nanaimo Art Gallery.
Photo credit Don Reicken
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