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<\/p>\nSome stop to scan QR codes and listen to artists describe their experiences. Others simply stand in silence.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of comments today and a lot of comments in the last few days, and most people need to come back,\u201d said Deb Kerr-Goodfellow, co-founder of the Susan Velder Gallery and More.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just so heavy that they need to come back and just without a big crowd and just spend some time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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(Video credit: Kenneth Cheung\/battlefordsNOW)\n <\/p>\n
The gallery is currently hosting Invisible Winds: Stories You Can Not See, Journeys toward Wholeness, the first stop of a travelling Saskatchewan exhibition curated through the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils (OSAC). Featuring work from 19 local artists, the exhibit explores the emotional realities people often carry quietly beneath the surface of daily life.<\/p>\n
The exhibition guide invites viewers to \u201cslow down, listen closely, and notice what is not immediately visible.\u201d<\/p>\n
For North Battleford mixed-media artist Holly Hildebrand, that invisible weight takes shape through layered fabric, dangling thread and fragmented portraits rooted in personal history.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking about thread and the threads that hold us together, those kinds of things, and things that stitch us together and how we\u2019re all sort of held together in different ways,\u201d Hildebrand said.<\/p>\n
Her two featured pieces \u2013 Ghosts and Shadows: Heather and Ghosts and Shadows: Teanna \u2013 explore adoption and post-traumatic stress disorder through tactile, heavily textured works built on raw canvas.<\/p>\n
One portrait surrounds an adopted woman with repeating silhouettes, reflecting feelings of disconnection and the search for belonging across generations. Another confronts the exhausting emotional reality of PTSD through fractured imagery, spiderweb patterns and handwritten reflections on fear, isolation and survival.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiving with PTSD can be debilitating and exhausting, and it often feels like much of it is beyond my control,\u201d reads part of the written reflection accompanying Ghosts and Shadows: Teanna.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe triggers and flashbacks invade my thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hildebrand said the pieces are intentionally personal, but never meant to remain only about the individuals portrayed within them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that people look at them and have some kind of sense of how it relates to themselves,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that\u2019s what art does, as you look at it and you think, oh, I like this because of that and this symbol, this whatever, speaks to me because it reminds you of something about yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rough textures and exposed stitching seem to mirror the emotional themes woven throughout the exhibition itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can feel the depth of the tragedy and the pain and the sorrow and all the frustration that goes along with whatever issue they were talking of,\u201d Kerr-Goodfellow said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think you also come away with hope and resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the gallery, a large mixed-media storyboard titled Pearl drifts between soft yellows, blurred figures and dark spirals.<\/p>\n
Created by local artist Mary Anne Baxter with writing by Susan Gordon, the piece reflects on a woman the pair knew decades ago while working in Vancouver\u2019s Downtown Eastside.<\/p>\n
Rather than painting a literal portrait, Baxter said she wanted to capture the emotional experience of living with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel that what I was trying to capture was the emotional state of Pearl and not so much that I wanted her image to be attached to a particular recognizable form,\u201d Baxter said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to be more of a sensation, a gesture of what was happening in her and with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The accompanying written story describes Pearl explaining her illness through invisible strings connecting her to the earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI float up into the sky. I can see everything: puffy clouds around me, people are small and funny and dogs are racing in the park. I can do anything I dream of. But then, I get scared. I can\u2019t see my friends. It gets stormy. There is lightning and big winds shake me too much and suddenly\u2014 I come crashing back to the ground,\u201d the text reads. <\/p>\n
\u201cFriends find me and take me to the hospital. At first I feel strange and slow but now I am getting better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baxter said memories of Pearl stayed with her for decades, particularly during a time when conversations around mental illness were often hidden behind shame or misunderstanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people\u2026 the family even treated it like an embarrassment,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Now, she hopes the work encourages viewers to pause before judging what they cannot immediately understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen more, think more, think about when you see somebody who\u2019s maybe not conventional,\u201d Baxter said. \u201cAllow some time to try to sort out what\u2019s going on, who\u2019s this person and what\u2019s happening?\u201d<\/p>\n
That same idea echoes quietly throughout the old church gallery, in the stitched portraits, unfinished outlines and stories carried through thread and shadow.<\/p>\n
In an essay included in the exhibition guide, author David A. Robertson reflects on his own experiences with mental health struggles and the healing he found through community and storytelling.<\/p>\n
\u201cArt is Story, and stories save lives,\u201d Robertson wrote. \u201cI know this as an incontrovertible fact.\u201d <\/p>\n
Inside the walls of the former church in St. Walburg, those stories now hang in silence and colour, visible at last to anyone willing to slow down long enough to see them.<\/p>\n