Eva Baboula marks a decade as Associate Dean

by | Jul 11, 2024 | Art History & Visual Studies, Faculty

For the past 10 years, Art History & Visual Studies professor Eva Baboula has been a consistent and guiding force as our longest-serving Associate Dean — a position from which she steps down on June 30. During that time, she not only continued teaching with AHVS but also worked with three different Deans, was Acting Dean for six months and served a year as the Associate Executive Director with UVic’s Learning & Teaching Support & Innovation division.

“When I first came into the position, I was really interested in helping students in a wider way than just teaching — there was an opportunity to understand what they were going through, and what issues were affecting them beyond content and courses,” she reflects. “I was also very interested in supporting students with accessibility issues, which has become an increasing priority in the last few years.”

With Fine Arts being the only UVic faculty with a single Associate Dean, Baboula has seen her role grow well beyond student support. Her portfolio includes not only academic success and support, but also recruitment and retention, curriculum development, international and Indigenous partnerships, interdisciplinary programs, and working closely with the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  

“It’s a joy to lead these initiatives,” she says. “This has developed into a more holistic position over the years: how can we support the students from the beginning to the end? I also often took on the support of research and creative activity in Fine Arts and across UVic; I have truly loved coaching graduate students with their SSHRC applications. And helping the professors also supports the students — I have enjoyed mentoring sessional instructors and taking care of our growing interdisciplinary programs.”

Baboula is particularly proud of the relationships she has developed with the entire Fine Arts community over the years: students, staff and teaching faculty included. “The kind of mentoring we do and the relationships we all have are quite different from the rest of the university; maybe it’s because we’re a relatively small faculty, but I find we’re all very close in an organic, integrated way.”

She also feels her skills as a mother of two have helped her succeed as Associate Dean. “I think we’re very much like parents to our students . . . you need to have compassion and understanding but, at the same time, you have to have good judgment and clear boundaries. That’s very important for a position like this.”

For now, AHVS professor Catherine Harding will be Acting Associate Dean until December 31, 2024, with a new Associate Dean beginning in 2025.

Faith, fuel and the life of poet Cara-Lyn Morgan

by | Jul 3, 2024 | Alumni, indigenous, Writing

Cara-Lyn Morgan grew up as a bit of a nomad, living at various times in Regina, SK, Windsor, ON and BC’s Okanagan region. She originally moved to Victoria to attend Camosun College’s criminal justice program and complete a criminology degree she had begun earlier at the University of Windsor.

But it turned out that Morgan was a poet at heart. UVic entered the picture as her Camosun program was wrapping up, and she decided to enrol as a Visual Arts student—initially only taking Writing courses on the side. “I had no plans of it being anything other than four years of creating art and maybe writing a few things,” she recalls. “But I never even finished my visual arts degree because I was so taken by poetry.”

For some students, the path through life is clear; others take a more circuitous journey to arrive at their destination. Morgan, who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2008, definitely sees herself in the latter camp, but the publication of her latest collection—Building a Nest from the Bones of My People—finds her weaving the various strands of her life into a powerful book of poetry fusing both sides of her cultural history. Morgan has both Indigenous (Métis) and immigrant (Trinidadian) roots.

“I feel like poetry has to do with the human voice in all of us,” she says. “I realize now that I’ve been a poet my whole life, but I just never understood what poetry was until I took my first class [at UVic]—no one had ever told me it was about more than just making up little cute rhymes.”

Part of that love of the lyrical stemmed from the Writing department’s poetic giants of the day: Lorna Crozier and Tim Lilburn, plus acclaimed instructors Carla Funk and Steven Price. “It was Tim who identified early on that I had a unique Afro-Indigenous voice that hadn’t been heard in Canada before,” Morgan recalls. “My professors saw the value of my work and recognized that I had a fresh perspective; that made me realize there was a seat at the table for me as a poet. That faith really fuelled my desire to put my work out in the world.”

Thanks to her Trinidadian father, Morgan was familiar with Caribbean and African-American authors, but it was at UVic that she first started to explore her Indigenous identity through the work of Canadian Indigenous poets like current Writing professor Gregory Scofield and Louise Halfe—and also with other students.

“The first time I was really exposed to Indigenous people was through the Indigenous student association,” she recalls. “Coming from a Métis family that had passed for white, it didn’t really mean much to me before; I guess I had always seen the two parts of my culture as very dual, so I now had to navigate how to combine them. I started to see an interconnection between these two cultural realities and began to braid them together as the product of colonization.”

The braiding continued off-campus as well, when her criminology background led to a job with the Canada Border Services Agency. “I wrote my first poetry collection in between ferries while sitting in the Victoria/US border booth—a lot of that work was actually written on those little declaration cards you get when you come across the border,” she chuckles.

Currently based in Toronto, Morgan still works for the Canada Border Services Agency (now in Indigenous affairs)—a position she holds thanks in part to some advice from Lorna Crozier.

“I remember sitting in Lorna’s office and telling her that I wanted to be a poet,” Morgan recalls. “She said to me, ‘Are you independently wealthy? Because every artist needs a job that will allow them to create their work.’ She basically told me that the idea of the starving poet is a myth, which freed me up to realize that a good, steady government job can actually be inspiring and offer the space and time and money to create work in a way that’s really free.”

Clearly it was good advice, as Morgan’s first two poetry collections, What Became My Grieving Ceremony and Cartograph, were released in 2014 and 2017. Her latest, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, was published in the fall of 2023 and explores the colonial injury of Black and Indigenous people from an intergenerational perspective.

She sees the history of Canadian colonization—both the transatlantic slave trade and First Nations enfranchisement and oppression—as two sides of a coin, which she explores in her new collection. “It was really about unifying those sides for me… I was able to stop feeling like I had a split personality and it was just part of the whole story.”

Beth Stuart’s monumental Montreal art commission

by | Jul 2, 2024 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, Faculty, Visual Arts

When it comes to her creative output, award-winning Visual Arts professor Beth Stuart works in an expanding range of media including writing, painting, ceramics, performance, textiles and sculptural installations. Picking up on overlooked historical moments, as well as characters and material techniques, she creates alternative plot points in the narrative of modernist abstraction in order to examine the physical and metaphysical implications of dissolving the figure-ground relationship. 

Her newest public art sculpture is Les Tendresses, commissioned by La Banque Nationale du Canada and installed in the lobby of their Montreal headquarters at a cost of nearly $1 million. “Les Tendresses represent a playful offshoot of a longer artistic passage through the history of the relationships between architecture, garment construction, modernist abstraction, queer embodiment and feminist practice,” says Stuart. 

Les Tendresses offers three monumental sculptures that animate the architectural forms of three adjacent columns through a lively transformation of stone into the suggestion of clothed figures.  Each “posture” and “costume” is distinct from the others: one upright and elegant, one soft and flowing, one ornate and whimsical. The molded sculptures are made using a centuries-old architectural plaster technique called scagliola, which authentically imitates marble, creating a double trompe l’oeil: architecture come to life, and cloth turned to stone. 

Les Tendresses is inspired by the delight emerging from unexpected transformations of the inanimate into the animate; the hard into the seemingly soft; the inorganic into the organic. The sculptures introduce a playful distortion of regular geometries, contrasting the calm, sober look of the surrounding grey stone and concrete against bright, lively columns made of the same materials. This juxtaposition suggests a bridge between the architecture of the space and the humans who move through it — recognizing the role of individuals within the community and the capacity of the imagination to draw connections.