Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed
She/Her
& She/Her They/Them
Hannah Jickling (she/her) and Helen Reed (she/they) have been collaborating since 2006. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter and artists’ multiples. They have facilitated many collaborative research projects with children, most notably Big Rock Candy Mountain (2015–). Jickling and Reed have exhibited and performed both their individual and collaborative works internationally and are recipients of numerous awards including the 2017 Mayor’s Arts Award for Public Art (City of Vancouver) and a 2018 VIVA Award (Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts). They are grateful to live and work on the traditional territories of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, where they teach Foundation studies at Yukon SOVA.
‘The Beaver Mat and the Fag(g)ot Shack’ is a queer take on rural survival, and an ongoing adaptation of two illustrations from the book “Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties: The Classic Guide to Building Wilderness Shelters,” a text intended for Boy Scouts, written by D.C. Beard in 1914. Initially, The Beaver Mat and the Fag(g)ot Shack was re-imagined as an installation at the Nida Artist Colony, a place to party with other gays in the context of a small seaside town. It was later extracted as a photograph of signage in both English and Lithuanian, and an opportunity to see our Western-out-ness complicated by an Eastern European setting. In 2019 we led a workshop with a queer youth group in Grande Prairie, Alberta through the support of curator Derrick Chang and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. We talked about the covert icons of regionally specific queer signage such as “Beaver Liquor Plus” and “JUBILEE!” 2020 finds us still gay and once-again living in a remote setting. We continue to work with these themes, as we move in and out of small town and rural contexts.
Above:
The Beaver Mat & The Fag(g)ot Shack, 2014
Installation/Party, dimensions variable
Left:
Workshop Process Images from the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, 2019
Digital compilation, 30cm x 39cm
Workshop Process Images from the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, 2019
Digital compilation, 30cm x 39cm
Results of The Beaver Mat & The Fag(g)ot Shack workshop from the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, 2019
Signs were produced during a workshop with the artists Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed with the participation of the LGBTQ+ youth from Grande Prairie and the surrounding region. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the youth that created new artwork for this installation, including Danny, Dante, Kurtis, Nadia & James.
