Inaugural JRSP residency showcases new sculptural work

by | Sep 24, 2025 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, donor, Visual Arts

A sculptural installation by Canadian artist Siobhan Humston will be on view exclusively at UVic from October 9-14, showcasing the results of a new artist-scholar residency created in association with the Jeffrey Rubinoff Foundation and UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts. The inaugural recipient of this new creative collaboration, Humston is just completing her six-week residency at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island.

“It’s always hard to imagine what may come from working in a new place,” says Humston, who has held a number of international residencies. “As an artist, the JRSP presents a surprise physicality to me — even though my resulting work may not be large, I feel like it has taken a lot of energy and space to produce, which reflects on the expansive nature of the park itself.”

Selected in May 2025 from a field on nearly 60 international artists to be the first UVic/JRSP Artist-Scholar, Humston has spent her time at the sculpture park developing new work combining themes involving music, synesthesia and humanity’s entanglement with the natural world. The resulting exhibit will open with an artist talk starting at 4 p.m. Thursday, October 9, in room 103 of the Fine Arts Building, followed by a 5 p.m. exhibit opening in UVic’s A. Wilfrid Johns Gallery (MacLaurin Building A-wing). The exhibit will run daily through October 14, with Humston also engaging with Fine Arts classes.

Humston has been working with tangible aspects of Hornby Island’s natural environment as a sculptural medium, as well as more traditional tools like graphite and pigments, while also recording ambient sounds integrating Rubinoff’s monumental steel sculptures found across the [note size] site.

“Walking the fields and forested areas, drawing and photographing his sculptures, working in Jeffrey’s barn studio and reading his texts have all been deeply inspiring,” she says.

JRSP curator Karun Koernig notes that, “Humston’s work quietly co-mingles the natural and human worlds. Particularly compelling for us was her ambition to integrate a soundscape into her residency, resonating deeply with Rubinoff’s profound connection to music.”

Previous residency work by Siobhan Humston 

In addition to creating new work, Humston says highlights of her residency have included learning about Rubinoff’s creative life and spending an extended time at the park itself. “The combination of being on the land at this time of year, listening to the ravens conversing, seeing these massive, beautiful sculptures at different times of day in changing weather . . . it’s all been so exciting and nourishing.”

Humston’s art has been exhibited in over 70 solo and group exhibitions in commercial, artist-run and public galleries, and is held in private and corporate collections in England, Europe, Australia and North America. She has a studio on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario.

2025 ONC ArtScience Fellow debuts exhibit

by | Sep 5, 2025 | Award, climate, Graduate, Visual Arts

When Parvin Hasani applied for the 2025 ArtScience Fellowship with Ocean Networks Canada — the sixth Fine Arts graduate student to hold this position — she proposed exploring the extreme ecosystems of deep-sea hydrothermal vents via her sculptural practice. Now, after spending the summer in conversation with ONC researchers and constructing her own conceptual pieces, she’s ready to debut her exhibit, Tides of Memory.

“Initially, I imagined creating pieces inspired by vent chimneys, but the work shifted toward a more layered connection,” Parvin explains. “I began linking the vents not only to geology but also to the deep mind — tracing parallels between flows of iron, water, and the ways memory forms and erodes.”

Ultimately, she came away with a deeper sense of how scientific ways of seeing the deep ocean could intersect with artistic imagination. “Hydrothermal vents revealed themselves as natural infrastructures — hidden, porous networks where flows of minerals and water carry echoes of memory across deep time,” she says.

Tides of Memory runs September 8-12 at the Audain Gallery in UVic’s Visual Arts building, with a public talk at 5pm Tuesday, September 9 in Visual Arts room A146.

Combining art with science

Thanks to ONC’s oceanographic research on the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vent Field — an active, mineral-rich environment on the deep-sea Juan de Fuca Ridge — Parvin was able to create a visual interpretation of these hidden systems that was grounded in her MFA sculptural practice.

“My graduate work explored water infrastructures, which shaped the way I began to think about the ocean and hydrothermal vents as kinds of natural infrastructure,” she says. “The materials and the techniques I used — plaster, brass in scagliola and electro-etching — allowed me to transform scientific information into installations and sculptures.”

Using these creative processes, she was then able to echo mineral growth and erosion. “These pieces translate data about vent fields into installations and sculptures that act as bodily archives of memory and time.”

The surprise for the artist was finding how deeply the notion of hidden networks resonates — “whether in the porous chimneys of hydrothermal vents or in the ways we imagine memory,” she says. “Talking with scientists, I felt we were tracing the same invisible lines from different worlds.”

Hear from the artist

As well as learning about her process and getting a guided tour, audiences at the public talk will learn more about the artistic and scientific concepts behind the exhibit.

“I’ll share how Tides of Memory reimagines hydrothermal vents through installations and sculptures — as bodily archives where geological processes, iron, and water become metaphors for memory and survival across deep time,” she says.

The call for applications for the 2026 ArtScience Fellowship will go out in Fall 2025. Read about our previous Fine Arts graduate student ONC artistic residencies: Megan Harton, Neil Griffin, Colin Malloy, Dennis Gupa and Colton Hash.