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About Terrain of Sensation
The City’s current Artist in Residence program began as a pilot project called the Artist in the Community Program in 2014.
In a public call for entry, artists were asked to develop a creative, inclusive, community-engaged art project that would encourage the animation of outdoor space at the City’s West End Community Centre. Following the review of submissions, the City’s Public Art Advisory Committee recommended awarding the project to Guelph artist, Pearl Van Geest.
Pearl’s project, Terrain of Sensation: A Collaborative Mapping Project combined traditional cartography with individual, personal artistic interpretations.
Participants of all ages were invited to contribute to a large-scale map by drawing, painting and sketching the grounds surrounding the Community Centre. The works they created were photographed, and then layered with site plans and topographical maps. The final project is a grid of these photographs showing the transparent layers of the participants’ artwork over top of the corresponding cartographical representations.
Terrain of Sensation hangs in the West End Community Centre where it was created and was accessioned into the City’s public art collection after the artist donated it in 2017.
About the artist
Guelph artist Pearl Van Geest has exhibited her work extensively since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1996 and recently completed her Master of Fine Art at the University of Windsor.
Van Geest’s paintings are part of the Canada Council’s Art Bank Collection and she is the recipient of grants from the Ontario and Canada Arts Councils.
She was shortlisted for the RBC Canadian Painting prize in 2003.
