Naimah-Bint Amin (They/them)

Emily Carr School of Art & Design

Naimah-Bint plans to travel to Bangladesh to research how contemporary and traditional visual practices engage with land, memory, and postcolonial identity. In Dhaka, they will spend time at the Asian Art Biennale and Dhaka Art Summit, which gather artists from across South Asia whose work addresses migration, environmental change, and decolonial aesthetics.

This journey trip will offer new insight into how Bangladeshi artists engage scale, material, and tradition—perspectives that will be carried forward in their painting practice.

Violet Johnson

University of British Columbia

Violet’s analog photo-sculptural practice directly engages with bodies of waters along the Pacific Northwest Coast as a means of tracing significant sites and memories of her personal and familial histories, with a critical lens of the ongoing ramifications of settler colonialism.

This winter, Violet intends to travel to London to work alongside other artists in her field to explore historic and alternative photography processes, as well as to immerse herself in the contemporary art scene of London through museum and gallery visits. She plans to engage in critical dialogue and making with other artists and researchers whose work concern the continued reverberations of colonialism through the lens of art.

Edith Skeard

University of Victoria

Edith is a multimedia artist, woodwind player, and composer working primarily within sound art and sculpture. Edith’s work focuses on building installation spaces through the intersection of light, sound, people, duration, and tactility.

With the Audain award, Edith will travel to the Sound Lab residency in Struer/Copenhagen, Denmark for a communal, month-long exploration of sound art within a sculptural context. The trip will be centered on immersive, sonic-based research, visiting contemporary galleries, and building relationships with other established and emerging sound artists.

Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba

Simon Fraser University

Alexis’s practice unfolds within the charged intersections between exile and return, where memory splinters and reassembles into new structures of meaning. Working across collage, sculpture, sound, moving image, and archival material, they weave together shards of history, echoes of queer desire, and traces of displaced lives. At its core, their work wrestles with the politics of return, not only of looted artefacts, but of stories, dignity, and belonging.

Alexis’s travel will explore the entangled histories of African artefacts in European institutions alongside the contemporary migration of queer Nigerian bodies.

Jesse Weemering

University of British Columbia Okanagan

Jesse’s sculpture practice involves hand-molding clay and carving wood, combining these sculpted elements with found objects from nature and industry. Jesse uses contrasts between natural and human-made materials to examine relationships between the human-constructed world and the natural environment. These juxtaposed materials and forms prompt questions about how humans relate to one another, to other animals, and to the rest of nature, and our mortality.