Fielding Road is a multi-site group exhibition curated by Jesse Birch and Elisa Ferrari at the Nanaimo Art Gallery. On view until October 2,  The exhibition responds to the work of poet, art critic and artist Peter Culley and his long-term engagement with his hometown of Nanaimo. Part of his relationship with the place of Nanaimo was informed by his correspondence with poets from the US and his travels to Vancouver to connect with his extended poetry and art community on the mainland.

With that in mind, four poets of different generations based in Vancouver and New York have been invited to The Polygon Gallery to read alongside his work and through their own connections to place.

About Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown is a poet who uses collage methods and song forms in her multiplicitous works, which recently include Other Archer (published in French as Autre Auchère in translation by Stéphane Bouquet). She edits the independent Tender Buttons Press and co-creates poetry happenings such as the Plays on Words at the Ontological Hysteric Theater Incubator Series and the Polyphonic Poetry Festival at The University of Cambridge where she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow and through her home salon, Torn Page in Chelsea, NYC. She teaches poetry at St. John’s University in Queens, NYC and lives part time in Marshall, NC.

About Maxine Gadd
Maxine Gadd is a Vancouver-based poet who lives and works in the Downtown Eastside. 
A graduate of the UBC English program in the early 1960s, Gadd has published numerous books, chapbooks, and little magazines including Lost Language (Coach House, 1982), Backup to Babylon (New Star Books, 2006), and The Subway Under Byzantium (New Star, 2008).

About Cecily Nicholson
Cecily Nicholson is the author of four books and a past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her most recent work, HARROWINGS (Talonbooks, 2022), considers Black rurality, agriculture, and art history. She volunteers with communities impacted by carcerality and food insecurity.

About Christian Vistan
Christian Vistan is an artist and curator originally from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, living and working on Musqueam, Squamish, Tsawwassen and Tsleil-Waututh territories, colonially known as Vancouver and Delta, British Columbia. In their artworks, they translate experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together various elements, including memory, place, poetry, and abstraction among others. They are particularly interested in working with water as a material in painting as well as in personal, familial and migrant histories. They make paintings, texts, and exhibitions, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, and curators. They received their BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017.

Image: Elisa Ferrari, Peter Culley walking Fielding Road (detail), 2013