Three ways donor support can help

by | Aug 24, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, donor, School of Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing

Lynda Gammon in the renovated computer lab 

Not surprisingly, student support in the form of scholarships, bursaries and financial prizes is the most popular form of donor support we receive. Consider Doug Gray, who created the Eleanor Gray Memorial Piano & Voice Duo Competition Prize in 2025 to both honour the memory of his mother and support Music students in two of our strongest areas — voice and piano.

We are also fortunate to have more named 
professorships than most UVic faculties, thanks to the likes of the Audain and Rubinoff foundations, and generous philanthropists like Wayne Crookes and the Southam, Lehan and Wurlitzer families. These endowed positions ensure that recruiting top-tier research talent remains a priority in Fine Arts.

Another area where donors have a direct impact on the student experience is with facility upgrades. There’s no question that our purpose-built facilities have long set us apart from other universities — yet those unique labs, studios, galleries and performance spaces also require constant technological upgrades to remain competitive.

Longtime Visual Arts professor Lynda Gammon has remained engaged with both Fine Arts and Victoria’s arts scene since retiring in 2015, now working with students as a Professor Emeritus. Realizing that one of the Fine Arts computer labs was in need of an upgrade, Gammon donated $10,000 this year to assist with much-needed improvements and to finance a new computer system — a change she was happy to make, given her history with the space: Gammon was Associate Dean under former Fine Arts Dean Anthony Welch when the first Fine Arts computer lab was established in the early 1990s.

“There was a lot of contention back then about whether computers could even be used to make art and what their role in the Faculty would be,” she recalls. “It took quite a bit of effort to push it forward — but once it was established, it quickly made such a huge difference.”

With Gammon’s assistance, the walls of our smaller computer lab — which serves as a digital photography
studio with a large-scale printer and negative scanner — have now been changed from peach to gray (to better reflect the true colour of photography), a magnetic photo board has been installed and a new computer was purchased which can run 3D neural-net calculations to better manipulate digital imagery.

Gammon appreciates the unique contribution retired faculty members can make. “We’re not your average donor: because we’ve been involved with the University and the students, we have a better idea of what’s needed,” she says. “I remember what it was like when we got a new piece of equipment — like the large-format printer — and how it not only allowed us to teach better but also helped my own art career. Incoming students are going to want to do things that are more than just traditional painting or sculpture.”

Offering first-hand experience with cutting-edge technology is just another way for our students to gain a competitive edge. “Once they graduate, they get jobs because they’ve learned how to use our computer systems,” she says. “It’s so essential for artists to not find technology scary, to realize how it might fit in with their practice . . . if you don’t take some of those fears away when they’re students, then it becomes an unapproachable barrier.”

Orion Fund marks 30 years of donor impact

by | Aug 18, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, donor, Faculty, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, School of Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing

Saeed Teebi

Phillipe Pasquier

Rachel Podger

When it comes to ongoing donor impact, it’s hard to imagine anything more lasting than the Orion Fund
in Fine Arts. Named for the constellation whose visibility across most of the globe makes it a universal symbol of human connection to the cosmos, the Orion Fund is appropriately used to bring the world to UVic by making the talents and achievements of visiting artists available to both students and Victoria’s wider community, who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

Originally established with an $80,000 investment from donor Josephine Berthier in 1996, the Orion Fund was then endowed by a further million-dollar bequest when she passed away in 2000. Today, it serves a variety of functions: the Orion Fund can finance short-term visits by distinguished guests from other parts of Canada and around the world, while the Orion Program for Visiting Artists & Scholars in the Arts is used for arranging longer visits, lasting up to a term.

The Orion Fund also makes it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions, establishing relationships that encourage and foster future exchanges. “I’ve witnessed first‑hand how the Orion Fund enriches not only our faculty and the wider community, but also how time spent on our campus with colleagues and students, meaningfully shapes the visiting artists’ and scholars’ own creative and scholarly work,” says Kirk McNally, Associate Dean Creative Activity, Research and 
Administration. “The fund allows us to build lasting relationships with a global community of thinkers and makers which is a remarkable gift and an enduring legacy of its generous donor.”

Paul Wong

Meryl McMaster

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie

Building for the future

We have also recently seen the creation of the Orion Incentivization Program, which annually provides extra Orion funds to our units if they invite scholars/artists who have lived experience regarding disability, racialization, gender and sexuality, and/or can help us to advance our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion action. “It has been incredibly valuable for our students to interact and learn from visiting artists and scholars from a wide range of demographics and lived experiences,” notes Dean Allana Lindgren.

Thanks to the Orion Fund, this past year saw over 15 international artists and scholars visit our classrooms and studios, including poets and authors Karen Solie, Saeed Teebi, Doretta Suk-Chong Lau and Kaie Kellough; AI scholars Phillipe Pasquier and Mike Ananny; conservator Helene Tello; musician Rachel Podger; Theatre artists Will Kilroy and Christie Maturo; and visual artists Allison Glenn, Meryl McMaster, Kristiina Lahde, Paul Wong, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie and Lan Yee.

And, over the past five years, we’ve brought in more than 70 guests solely as a result of the Orion Fund: that’s a remarkable return of creative expertise and international experience resulting from a direct investment by a donor in student support. Considering that most of today’s students had yet to be born when Josephine Bertheir made her initial donation in 1996, it really speaks to the lasting, long-term impact of her gift.

Visual Arts grad student Edith Skeard explores ocean sounds

by | Aug 4, 2026 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, Award, donor, Graduate, Visual Arts

While they may have just graduated in June 2026 with an MFA in Visual Arts, multi-media artist Edith Skeard isn’t quite done with UVic yet. This summer, they are the latest Fine Arts grad student named to the Ocean Networks Canada ArtScience Fellowship program.

Skeard has been spending their summer creating sound works from ONC’s immense data collections. “I’ve been learning from their science team and engaging with the Oceans 3.0 portal,” they explain. “My primary focus has been on the relationship between seismic events and the flora and fauna of the ocean . . . . this is a really lovely opportunity to focus in on sound and the library of hydrophones ONC has.”

Given that biology underpins a lot of their practice, this ArtScience collaboration is well within Skeard’s purview. “It’s been really wonderful to learn about their work, engage with the sea and create new sound works which utilize their data,” they say. “This was a unique opportunity for deeper, focused research-making.”

Oceanic fascination

Skeard says their ONC application centred on tsunamis and earthquakes — which were present in their MFA work — and aligns perfectly with both the ecological and technological aspects of their artistic practice. Despite coming from Saskatchewan (or perhaps because of it), Skeard  has always been fascinated by the ocean.

At UVic’s ONC, Skeard has been able to coordinate and perform for one of the ONC community’s lunch-and-listen sessions (where they and two Prodigy program ArtScience fellows played new compositions), as well as meet with different scientists, attend tour their Marine Technology Centre and attend an Oceans Past Symposium. Still to come in August is a site visit to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.

“My welcome has been warm and the science team has been generous with their time and knowledge sharing,” they say. “I’m learning a lot and feeling immersed in the different teams and activities. This year is quite special in that there are several sound and music researchers and fellows working at ONC this summer. It’s been really interesting to hear how other folks are interpreting the data in their works.”

New projects

At ONC’s Ocean-Climate Building headquarters (found at UVic’s Queenswood campus), Skeard has installed a sculptural “listening station” in the lobby, which they describe as more of “a personal sound experience” than a formal installation. “It plays a continuous loop composed from ONC data and changes every month . . . the sound is deeply environmental and pulls from ONC’s vast hydrophone data. So far, folks have been really interested in listening and I’ve received good feedback on it.”

Skeard will also be participating in Abyssal Soundings: A Concert Utilizing Ocean Networks Canada Data, running from 11am-1pm Sunday, August 16 in UVic’s Philip T Young Recital Hall. In addition to Skeard, the lineup will feature Distinguished Music Alumna Eve Egoyan plus Valeria Valle, Urano Trincado, Omar Shabbar, Kieran Maraj and Visual Arts professor Joel Ong, who is also a Canada Research Chair in Emergent Digital Art Practices — each of whom will present their own interpretations of ONC data gleaned during their tenure.

Register here for this free August 16 event! 

Skeard’s ONC listening station

On the rewards of donor awards

Since coming to UVic from Saskatchewan to complete their MFA in Visual Arts,  Skeard has seen their creative work blossom thanks to numerous donor awards. During their two-year period of study, Skeard has received the Audain Foundation Travel Award, the Laura Carberry Scholarship in Fine Arts, the Robert W. Ford Graduate Scholarship, Audrey St. Denys & M.E. Johnson Scholarship, Helen Pitt Fine Arts Scholarship, Jessie Allan Forsyth Scholarship, John and Myrtle Tilley Graduate Scholarship, the Jeffery Rubinoff Art as a Source of Knowledge Graduate Scholarship and, most recently, the Ocean Networks Canada ArtScience Fellowship.

“I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish my studies without this generous funding, which was in large part the labour and coordination of the graduate advisors in Visual Arts,” says Skeard. “I’m very grateful to have been able to pursue my thesis with less friction and less reliance on external income. It is such a gift to be able to work freely towards research and making.”

Working mainly with sound, sculpture and drawing, Skeard uses granulation software to modify a mix of field recordings, woodwinds and voice to compose their sound. “I’m interested in the ways that the body and materials intersect, and am very open to experimenting with materials when working in the studio,” they say, explaining their work is often inspired by a fascination with labyrinths, translation, dreams, repetition and desired paths. “I often treat sound as tactile and materials as dense poetics — contemplating gestures of embodied time.”

 After earning both a BA (Philosophy, Honours) and BFA (Visual Art) at the University of Regina, Skeard began considering how graduate school could blend their passion for music with more visual work: having previously collaborated with School of Music Masters alumni — who all spoke highly of their experiences here — and realizing that a Visual Arts MFA offered studio space and the chance to work interdisciplinarily, Skeard decided UVic was the perfect place to continue their education. “It’s a rewarding process for those who want to be challenged and reflect on their work in a new context,” they say of their MFA work. “The community it fosters is really a large part of the experience.”
This past year, Skeard has been very busy mounting two solo exhibitions, participating in interdisciplinary showcases and activating their Audain Travel Award. In Belgium, they visited curators, galleries and the Orpheus Institute — a premier international center for advanced musical studies and artistic research — before connecting with the Bureau for Listening, a leading artistic research group in Copenhagen.

Watch for more news about their ONC installation coming up in September 2026.

—with files by Claudia Phillips and photos by Shay Ball

UVic Workstudy students Claudia Phillips (Writing) and Shay Ball (Visual Arts) are just two of nearly 75 Fine Arts students hired annually to learn professional skills outside of their classes. Their work will now appear in various Fine Arts publications, on this blog and on our social media feeds.

Writing students mark fatal heat dome anniversary

by | Jun 29, 2026 | climate, donor, Faculty, health, Undergraduate, Writing

To mark the fifth anniversary of BC’s fatal heat dome in 2021, a group of UVic Writing students trained to take climate-survivor testimonials are now seeing their work run in the online news outlet The Tyee in a new five-part series with created in partnership with the Climate Disaster Project. 
“Some of what they share can be difficult to read. But the survivors want you to know what happened to them for a reason,” says CDP founder and Writing professor Sean Holman. “So we can be closer together. So we can feel less alone. So you know what to do when one of the worst days of your life happens, without warning.”

The human cost of BC’s heat dome was catastrophic: over 600 people died between June 25 and July 1 2021, making it the deadliest weather disaster in Canadian history. Over 100 all-time heat records were shattered as temperatures across the province soared 20° above typical summertime averages in a brutal reminder of how warm our world is becoming.

The Tyee series offers the stories of five heat-dome survivors, as told in their own words:

  • a Surrey mother whose newborn was struggling, and so was her ailing cat
  • a Vancouver homeowner who had to find a new home when her condo turned into a greenhouse
  • a Lower Mainland firefighter who answered emergency calls as extreme heat buckled the province’s health-care system
  • a retired school principal who was forced to evacuate when that heat turned to flame in Lytton
  • and a Kamloops councillor who could do little but watch as fire scorched one of the city’s outer neighbourhoods.
“These stories aren’t just an account of the harm caused by an environment we have harmed and are still harming,” says Holman, explaining how the CDP’s climate-survivor testimonies differ from traditional news stories. “They are early warning systems and emergency preparedness plans. Because the survivors of past climate disasters carry with them knowledge and wisdom needed to help us confront the extreme events that have now become seasonal. Reading their testimonies now isn’t just about memorialization. It’s about preparation. An opportunity to change what will happen today and tomorrow.”
The Climate Disaster Project was established in 2022 by Sean Holman — UVic’s donor-funded Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental & Climate Journalism — and has since grown into an award-winning international teaching newsroom with partners in multiple countries around the world, tackling projects ranging from journalism and documentaries to a theatrical play, museum exhibit and a pending literary anthology. It also gives our students the chance to see their work appear in professional media like The Guardian UK & The Tyee, among many others.

Aaron Richmond named new JRSP resident artist

by | Jun 15, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, donor, Research, Visual Arts

The Jefferey Rubinoff Foundation and the Faculty of Fine Arts are pleased to announce that Canadian artist, scholar and curator Aaron Richmond has been selected as the 2026 Recipient of the UVic/Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Artist-Scholar Residency.

Aaron’s practice situates in the intersection of visual art, architecture and performance studies. With a PhD in Art & Architectural History from McGill University, a Masters in Intellectual History from Cambridge University and a Masters in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, Richmond holds an extensive record of awards and residencies. He is currently an affiliated assistant professor with Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts.

Aaron Richmond

During his July 5-26 residency at Hornby Island’s JRSP, Richmond will develop a body of work that moves, like a relay, from landscape-architectural drawings to the creation of lightweight temporary sculptures. With this work, Richmond hopes to engage the park’s sculptural environment as a living archive, while also treating it as a prompt for the continued exploration of material practices, ideas and gestures. He is interested in art’s continued relevance as a space for experimentation and its dynamic interplay between graphic, formal, textual and performative modes of attention, and about the kinds of fleeting scenography suited to this moment of social and environmental uncertainty.

While at the JRSP, Richmond will share his working process with visitors at the sculpture park and offer limited select guided attentional walks: an embodied on-site demonstration of the relays, prompts and curiosities that animate it. Then, from November 17-20, he will visit UVic’s campus, where he will offer guest lectures, artist talks, a workshop and studio visits for Fine Arts students, staff and faculty members. An exhibition of the works he  creates at the JRSP will also be on display and open to the public in November (venue TBA).

Following his JRSP residency, Richmond will be the 2026-2027 Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he will be working on Cotyledons: A Catalogue of Exchanges between the graphic and performing arts. This project asks: when does the mapping of a situation — whether in the form of an architectural projection, a conceptual schema, or a choreographic score — become an experimental prompt for bodies in motion? And what kinds of artworks or artifacts give evidence of this dynamic interplay between graphic form and performative play?

We are very much looking forward to welcoming Aaron this July for his three-week residency at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island. Stay tuned to follow his body of work develop as he responds to the interplay between continued exploration and the Park’s sculptural environment.

Established in 2025, the annual UVic/JRSP Artist-Scholar Residency was created as a competitive inter-institutional partnership based around an unwavering belief in cultivating the arts. Find out more about this partnership.

This residency is for artists and scholars seeking space to focus on creating a work for exhibition or publication that is in some way informed by their investigation of Jeffrey Rubinoff’s work and their experience working at the sculpture park.

The successful applicant enjoys a 2-5 week  residency at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park with an additional week at UVic to engage with Fine Arts faculty and students.

Eeman Masood’s digital tree grows in New York City

by | Jun 1, 2026 | Alumni, Award, climate, donor, Graduate, Visual Arts

New York City’s “Midnight Moment” is the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art program. Since 2012, over 100 contemporary artists have presented their work to millions of viewers on one of the most iconic public canvases: the electronic billboards of Times Square. There, for three minutes nightly and 364 nights a year (except for when the ball drops on New Year’s Eve), the ads are dimmed on 95+ screens from 41st to 49th Streets, and the art takes over.

For the month of February, a hand-painted animation of a banyan tree by Eeman Masood (Visual Arts MFA 2025) titled There is a voice that doesn’t use words, Listen — which was her MFA thesis project — transformed Times Square from one of the world’s most technological and chaotic boulevards into a poetic, immersive experience, reflecting on the silent languages of nature and the endurance of the natural world.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Masood earned her BFA from Lahore’s National College of Arts (NCA) in 2021 with a major in miniature painting before coming to UVic to pursue her graduate work on a fully funded scholarship. While at UVic, she was the recipient of several notable awards, including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Graduate Scholarship, the Jessie Allan Forsyth Scholarship and the Canwest Global Scholarship in Video Arts.

Masood’s work explores the emotional and spiritual connections between nature, solitude and ecological awareness. Combining traditional techniques with contemporary mediums, she expands classical miniature painting through intricate works and hand-painted animations. We caught up with her recently for this Q&A.

What does it mean to you to have your work shown on such an enormous canvas as Times Square? Did people literally stop and “listen,” as the title encourages?

“It was a magical moment, truly, and I feel very grateful to have had this opportunity,” says Masood. “My work features the banyan tree, under which many gatherings and discussions used to take place. Bringing that tree to the busiest street in the world and projecting it above people kind of recreated the same sense of gathering—but in a very different way. I would go there every midnight to quietly stand among the audience, and it was so moving to see people stop, sometimes filming at first, but then pausing and just absorbing the work fully.”

MFA grad Eeman Masood stands in front of her hand-painted animation of a banyan tree,
spreading nature & calm across chaotic Times Square (all photos: Michael Hull/Times Square Arts)

Your thesis project specifically focused on the banyan tree: why choose that as your subject matter? And why did you choose to create a hand-painted animation?

“The banyan tree is one of South Asia’s most prestigious trees, often called the mother tree or the walking tree because it keeps expanding,” she says. “It’s also endangered, and I wanted to raise awareness about that. But the work goes deeper, reflecting on how we are part of nature and connected to the universe. The title of the work is a quote by the Persian mystic Sufi poet Maulana Rumi, asking us to reflect within. Being trained in traditional miniature painting, I wanted to translate the detailed, meditative connection between breath and brush into hand-painted animation, expanding the world of my paintings naturally into motion: in the video, the leaves move slowly and naturally align with the breath.”

You received a number of awards and funding during your graduate studies: what did that amount of donor support mean to you, and what did it enable you to do?

“I am deeply grateful to all the donors who supported me during my MFA studies,” she says. “As an international student, it’s very challenging to manage living expenses while producing work and investing in materials: these awards gave me financial relief, allowing me to focus fully on my creative practice without constant stress. They also enabled me to buy materials I needed and take risks in my work. Beyond the practical support, it felt encouraging to know people believed in what I was doing. I honestly couldn’t have completed my projects without their support.”

How did your time in the Visual Arts department impact your creative development? How much of an influence was your grad advisor, Kelly Richardson?

“My time at UVic will always be one of my most memorable periods. Moving to Canada, it became my first home, and I felt supported by faculty, staff and students. Facilities like private studios, editing rooms and scanners allowed me to experiment and work freely, which was crucial for my creative growth. Professor Richardson has been such a positive influence: when I arrived at UVic, I hadn’t imagined moving from painting into animation, and much of that transition happened because of her encouragement and support. She always pushed me to do better, and her own work was a constant inspiration. We connected on many ideas, and I’ve learned a lot from her practice and journey as an artist. She helped me believe in myself and my work, especially during difficult moments, and I’m deeply grateful for her support.”

What’s next for you?

“I recently completed an artist residency at the Banff Centre, where I began a new animation project that I plan to continue developing. Alongside that, I’m preparing a new series of paintings. Moving forward, I want to explore how animation and painting can continue to inform each other, expanding the worlds I’ve been building in my work. It’s an exciting time to experiment, take risks and grow my practice—I’m looking forward to seeing how these new projects develop over the coming months and years!”

This story appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine