Inquiry Collective Members

V. Jane Gordon, an award-winning artist, curator, writer and teacher was educated at Queen's University and SGW Concordia University obtaining a Master's degree in painting and drawing with a specialty in Arts Education. Her current artistic production deals with the body - in the body's curving envelope of space. She continues to examine history, recent or ancient, cultural and political and explores her human state - both natural and constructed, searching for ways to connect both the cultural and embodied experience of the lived life. Her artistic production includes painting and drawing, gallery based and landscape based installation, landscape and urban interventions, photo-documentation, and digitally layered works and projections.

Her Malta inquiry project entitled, "two and five, the cultural implications of bilateral symmetry" grounds her work in the body's presence and allows for related conceptual investigations into a broad range of subjects from ancient temples to contemporary advertising banners.

Educated at the University of Guelph, Sophie Edwards is an emerging artist/writer and a community animator/activist in the Manitoulin-La Cloche region of Northern Ontario. She has won numerous awards for her work, and been invited to exhibit with group and solo shows. Her work encompasses site installation, intervention, painting and multi-media. Through inquiries an emerging language of motherhood explains the parameters of "home" and merges with conflicting desires to be held within this circle and to simultaneously withdraw from it.

In Sophie’s inquiry project, entitled Shield and Temple, Canada’s Precambrian Shield and the prehistoric temples of Malta are places for exploration of the wildness of landscape and the culture of archaeology, respectively. Works will integrate site intervention with drawing, photography text and installation.

Gerald Allain graduated from Ryerson University in Photography and works as a freelance photographer. He has a finely-honed and painterly sensibility behind the lens. His heritage in the villages of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula first fueled his passion for photography and he still carries a strong attachment to the weathered, antic, accidental presence of the beautiful in the historic settlements of that region.

His Malta Inquiry project, "Creating in your yard," is an exploration of this highly constructed personal (haptic) space in a variety of historic human habitations. Using digital photography and video Gerald can make magic appear in the most mundane and ordinary location, allowing curiosities to reveal themselves from his "intimate distance"

Don Gordon was educated as an Engineer at Queen's University and as a photographer at the Three Schools. His photographic work is often black and white concentrating on the nuances of values in the medium. In the course of his engineering life he has routinely documented the progress of developing architectural and technical design projects as they have come into being. His inquiry project "Patch and Make Good" is an outgrowth of this documentary practice as it relates to his knowledge of buildings and architecture and his photographic practice using greyscale images. Buildings are seen as processes. These processes are fueled by time and implemented by the bodies that inhabit structures and adapt them for consecutive purposes and new uses.

His photographic work for the Malta Inquiry project will seek out and document the small details that add up to a record of human habitation from prehistoric time onward. Works will integrate image and text in a way that facilitates cultural commentary on contemporary experience.

Ulrike Balke graduated from Sheridan College and has used her design education to support activities as a committed painter and stitcher as well as employment in the advertising and design industry. Ulrike's current work uses digital paint programs to literally stitch together digital evidence of inquiry, original texts and painted images. Her technical facility with the digital world gives her the ability to subvert commercial processes used in advertising and design and create powerful and alternative cultural statements, for projection or the web environment.

Her Malta Inquiry Project "Butcher's Daughter, The Myth of Sacrifice" springs from her personal experience and unites her inquiry with mythic traditions common to human cultures around the world. Maltese myths and the architecture of these stories, performance/spoken word and layered drawing and digital image will form the basis of her work.

i5 Collective - History and Focus

The Inquiry Collective (i5) came together while working on a project in Northern Ontario. The senior member of the group, V. Jane Gordon was conducting an inquiry process workshop investigating the part of Canada where two icons of Canadian stone meet i.e. In the area around Manitoulin Island and the la Cloche mountains of Killarney Park where the precambrian shield meets the UN world biosphere reserve of the Niagara Escarpment. The inquiry process needs organizational, documentary and computer technology support and the pooled talents of the individuals of the i5 collective naturally rose to the surface of the larger group. These five individuals recognized that they were like-minded with similar intellectual and inquisitive capacities, and with complementary skills in organization, the arts and technology. The five artists founded a co-educating, co-mentoring collective using the Inquiry Method on the final day of the La Cloche /Manitoulin workshop in August of 2005.

The inquiry method emphasizes the space between the hand and the body as a site from which artist's investigation and research can be authentic and fruitful. Sites chosen for investigation are both literally and figuratively "touch stones" where the i5 collective continues to focus on stone as a kind of world membrane manipulated by the human hand throughout the history of our species and through which cultural practices pass. The oldest proto-architectural stone structures on the planet are on the tiny Island of Malta home to three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. i5 will spend 14 days in Malta inquiring into the stone remnants of the Hal-Saflieni Hypogeum, Ghar Dalam, Mnajdra, Hagar Qim, Gganitja, and Tarxien all listed by UNESCO in its world heritage sites. In addition Malta, always an important strategic site in the Mediterranean, has Roman Ruins and many mediaeval stone sites as well as the Baroque City of Valetta, another UNESCO world heritage listing, with its centuries of fortifications.