Lindsey Bond Studio

Lindsey Bond-Garcia
(she/her)
MFA Intermedia

Lindsey Bond CV

BIOGRAPHY

Lindsey Bond-Garcia is an intermedia artist, educator, and mother. Her practice is rooted in nurturing a blended family of Canadian (Scottish, English, and German) and Salvadorian (through marriage). She lives and works in amiskwaciwâskahikan—also known as Beaver Hills or Edmonton—on Treaty 6 Territory, near the North Saskatchewan River. Lindsey holds an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Alberta, a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and studied Visual Communications at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

Lindsey’s photo- textile work builds alternative-archives that engage with settler colonial histories rooted in remembering, questioning, and intervening. She uses textiles and photography to unsettle personal and public photo archives, fostering space for intergenerational and collaborative art making. Her practice examines her own family stories, uses her family images to trouble white agrarian women’s narratives, and explores whirlpools as a visual device that organically entangles and layers stories together.

Lindsey works across generations—with family and plant kin—to support community-based learning and relationship building. Through slow processes such as photographic printing, textile needlework, eco-printing, and hand-picked herbal teas, she creates work that invites connection, reflection, and inquiry: Which stories hold together, and which begin to fray? In roots, leaves, folds, and stitches, she shares entangled and relational stories.

Outside of her art practice, she works with Gallery@501 as the Visual Arts Education Programmer, organizing inclusive arts education for all ages. As a programmer and educator, Lindsey welcomes diverse communities in, creating accessible, engaging, and meaningful artistic experiences.

Her artwork has been exhibited in The Alberta TREX Program, Gallery 1C03, Gallery 44, MAWA, Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts and The Richmond International Film + Media Arts Festival. Most recently, her work is included in Craft & Craftivism: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Ceramic, Fibre, and Glass Artists in Canada. Please visit @lindseybondstudio or http://www.lindseybond.ca/

Artist Statement

I am an intermedia artist-mother born in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Beaver hills House) or Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory. Over the last six years, my art practice has explored textiles as a way to unsettle personal and public photo archives fostering intergenerational and relational art making.

Before beginning my MFA, I primarily worked as a photo-based artist creating alternate archives about the Edmonton Remand Centre chalk messages (ERC Newspaper) and counter colonial stories about the Canadian railway (Negotiating spaces). My first solo exhibition, Negotiating Spaces, was presented at Harcourt House in 2011. Since then, I have continued to grow my practice while becoming a mother, working with Prairie Artist-Run Centres, such as Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) and Art City Inc. and attending residencies including Wood Land School at Plug In ICA and Train of Thought with Jumblies Theatre. Working in this way created a strong community foundation from which I could begin acknowledging complex settler colonial prairie narratives and work towards “everyday decolonization” to unsettle, grapple and repair my own family stories.

To navigate personal and public interwoven histories, I decided to shift to incorporate inherited textiles into my photography practice. This decision was put into practice when I inherited my family “red rose tea tin” photo archive and sought to develop a stronger relationship with my elderly Aunts who practice needlework. I created my MFA thesis work called Ecosystems of Memory, where I re-storied my Aunts stories and our family photo archive images through large scale photographs, textiles -a large and heavy appliqué quilt and photo-sculpture series in 2021. From there, I started The Collab Quilt Collective—an ongoing, community-based textile project that broadens this work beyond my own family stories and into a collective community dialogue.

Currently, I continue to intervene in images from my white-settler family “red rose tea tin” archive and the “Last Best West” public archive, to remember and to trouble stories and sew a relationship with Treaty 6 Territory and kisiskâciwani-sîpiy /North Saskatchewan River. I am learning Salvadorian stories from my mother- in- law, who is a Salvadorian refugee who brought her family of four children to Canada in the 1980’s fleeing from civil war. With inherited stories, my children, and plant kin as companions, I stitch messy appliqué quilts and swirling quilted whirlpools, and embroider into photo-polymer gravure prints, weaving together entangled family stories.

In both my art practice and family life, I am committed to holding and making space for these critical conversations that explore legacies of inheritance, colonialism and repair. I believe in the power of visual storytelling to hold complexity—the messiness, the grief, and the resilience. In this context, art-making becomes both an act of care and a form of resistance. I create artwork that merges storytelling and textiles and challenges notions of the “archive”. It is a way of honoring truth, fostering healing, and offering care not only to myself as artist, but also to those take part in the creating process and those who witness it.

I currently nurture a blended Salvadorian - Canadian family of four. I am descended from Scottish (MacLean), English (Reynolds/Bond), and German (Weich/Hoffman) families who farmed on Treaty 6 and 7, the ancestral lands of nêhiyaw, Métis, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux, Dene, Anishinaabe and Inuit. The last four generations of the Reynolds/ Bond family lived near Lone Rock, SK (Treaty 6), the Hoffman family from Hannah/ Okotoks, AB (Treaty 7) and the MacLean family from Fredericton, NB, unceded territory of the Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) Peoples.

Experimental Photography (pinhole cameras) at Hapnot Collegiate, Flin Flon, MB

As an Artist in the Schools, through the Manitoba Arts Council,  I teach Experimental Photography program where students learn about analogue image making through the creation of photograms, pinhole cameras with the option to work up to building a life size Camera Obscura and mural. This program builds students’ awareness about the inner workings of early cameras and optics by exploring the photographic fundamentals such as: perspective, focus, light theory and composition. Within natural and staged environments, students will also create ephemeral drawings, tracings and movements that capture and connect them to their local and national photographic milieu. Students will learn about specific artists and examples where early photography and painting and nature intersect, encouraging the class to reconsider the relationship between the two mediums historically and in their lived experience today. The experimental nature of this program makes photography an accessible and inclusive art form, opening up the creative potential of students. This program encourages the discovery of one’s own vision through a hands-on-learning, active looking and of course a bit of magic (or sleight of hand).

In June of 2015, Bond was a guest artist on Train of Thought, a community arts journey (with a company of 30+ artists, writers, dancers and philosophers) from west-coast to east-coast of Canada focusing on collaborations and alliances between First Nations and settler/immigrant artists and communities.