ForTable Making, I hosted and recorded one-on-one dinners with Canadian contemporary artists whose practices reflect community, challenge structural systems and create space. The safe, intimate circumstance of dinning together allowed me to ask: How do situate your practice in the world? How do you drive meaning from your artwork? How do you measure your work’s impact? I am interested in how art can build space for resistance and resilience. I documented the people, the dinners, and the conversations through portrait painting and audio recording, paying reverence to the artists who engage and activate.

The name Table Making was inspired by Taien Ng-Chan’s contribution to the UAAC panel Radicalizing the Lazy Academy, and Taien’s essay Towards a Radical Re Thinking of Tables (Ng-Chan, 2020), where she describes the efforts artists at the margins are making to create their own tables, instead of waiting for, or accepting, a seat at the table that already exists. She notes that this process of table making is complicated hard work, and requires relationally and skill sharing; “Let us call our tables places of friendship, where we can develop relationships, networks, spaces for ourselves. Let us teach each other and learn from each other’s mistakes in table-building.” It is in this spirt that I dined with my artist guests. For this project I have also been deeply inspired by Cathy Mattes’ Métis Kitchen Table Talks, and her doctoral dissertation “Indigenous littoral curation: a viable framework for collaborative and dialogic curatorial practice”, holding the idea of creating safe spaces for dialogue and community.