Joanne Sale: Artist Update

We caught up with Joanne Sale to find out what she has been working on while in residence at the Caetani centre. "I've been mainly working with the theme of endangered species/climate change for the past year and a half.The larger works that I've produced in that time have included a series of images carved into stained plywood, a lino print wallpaper installation, a large freestanding tower papercut (of sorts), and I am in the early stages of a furniture piece and a video projection piece." "As I've been working on these, I have also been creating smaller lino prints and etchings, some directly related to the theme and some not. These are the smaller pieces that I have for sale.Works for sale can be seen here:Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/JoanneSaleArt/Instagram: joanne_sale68" "Right now I have an installation (Extinction Wallpaper) up at the Victoria Arts Council Gallery in downtown Victoria until February 28 (group exhibition called eco:echo)Starting in April I will be in a group exhibition in Prince George at Two Rivers Gallery. That one is called All For Water, and is themed around the protection of freshwater. In this exhibition, I'll have one of my carved pieces which I have made since starting this series of residencies, and two other large paintings made a couple of years before that, all of which depict sturgeon."BioJoanne Salé earned her BFA from UBC-Okanagan in 2005, where she worked in sculpture, drawing, etching, and painting. She has had solo exhibitions and been included in group exhibitions throughout the province.Artist StatementThe themes that emerge in my work are primarily perception, mediation, connection, adaptation and longing.In the past few years, my concern about the accelerating rate of species extinction has become the forefront in my mind, causing me to think about not just the interconnectedness of life, but what happens when species within this vast network become absent.I have started to create a new body of work, collectively titled Falling, which points to the complexity and beauty of the natural world, and simultaneously grieves the destruction that we are bringing upon it.The various species of animals and plants depicted in Falling are taken from the Canadian Species at Risk Act list.The first pieces that I have created in this new body of work consist of stained plywood, which I have carved images into, using the tonal variation in the plywood to enhance the images. They depict the interconnected web, which appears often in my work, paired with images of falling animals and plants.Extinction Wallpaper is a large scale lino print in six sections, which can be complete as one panel, and has also been designed to tessellate, enabling it to be used to paper a larger area. It depicts various arthropods from the Canadian Species at Risk Act list as well as a falling chestnut tree that are layered with a wallpaper pattern. I first used wallpaper symbolically in my work in 2002, to represent something that is fundamentally present but is not necessarily consciously observed.Network Tower is a large five-sided structure covered in a material that has been cut, in the style of a papercut, to depict interconnected lines and falling species. It is lined with dressmaker's pattern tissue and lit internally.