(b.1998) Autumn Star is an interdisciplinary artist from the prairies. Star received a Visual Arts Diploma from Red Deer Polytechnic, then a BFA from Alberta University of the Arts with a major in drawing and a minor in sculpture. Followed by an MFA from NSCAD University. Star works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, painting and filmmaking to engage in a radical process of myth-making and mark-making. By using her hands and head, she creates space for a figural-focused embodied art practice that features the poetics of strange, colourful creatures laced with emotion. Her paintings often carry eco feminist values from a thoughtfully queer ‘fem’ perspective.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I connect and project with the often impolite or awkward emotions of rage, embarrassment, guilt, and humour, while in despair when I'm painting and sculpting; I spit all of this out in tune by relentlessly working on figurative bodies, resonating emotions visually. My artistic practice resides within intersections of eco feminism and embodied research methodologies. Figurative art uniquely conveys and evokes emotion that enables people to experience issues viscerally, hence challenging dominant aesthetic narratives around gender and power. I seek to visualize bodies not as fixed or binary, but as fluid, fragmented, and in constant negotiation with desire and space. The human figure has long been a battleground in art history; idealized, objectified, and constrained by patriarchal and colonial gazes. My work responds to and resists this legacy by reclaiming the figure as a vibrant vessel of multiplicity and transformation. I create colourful creatures that are in flux, merging, dissolving, expanding; reflecting both the instability and resilience of daydreaming, they hold constant curiosity within themselves. The process is informed by somatic inquiry, which conceptually feeds into movement, breathwork, and sensory memory to help guide the shape of the physical creation of each piece. Rather than striving for anatomical "correctness," I prioritize modes of myth-making within an art-filled condition through figural sculptures that embrace the absurd and the hopelessly goofy as an invitation to experience the body as a dynamic, relational form.