quiet conversation collective

THE QUIET CONVERSATION COLLECTIVE

Brooke Allan (Scotland), Amy Berthan (England), Elena Duff (Ireland), Danielle Fontaine Koslowsky (Canada), Laura Bernard (Italy), Alina Sedlerova (Ukraine), Margaret Timbrell (United States), Clare Thomas (Canada)

January 2025

Some of my favorite conversations have been with other artists. Seemingly, there's an unspoken set of values among those prioritizing creativity that quick-starts a connection. I often feel seen, inspired, and engaged in these exchanges. Hearing about another artist's process and materials, invites me to think about other ways of doing and being. Their thoughts often validate the uniqueness and the sameness of our experiences on the artist's path.

Through the years of conversing with other artists, I began imagining a conversation through our various materials rather than our spoken words. This concept has been circling my brain for fifteen plus years. Most recently, I shared an experience in Venice, Italy with a small group of artists from around the world. We had a finite time to get to know each other and in one of our group meetings, I shared my vision. There was immediate excitement. It occurred to me and all of us that this might be the perfect time to experiment with this idea.

Now back in our respective countries, zooming online to iron out the details of communicating with paint, fiber, different time zones, etc., we are moving forward. I am so grateful for everyone’s willingness and enthusiasm to continue our conversations in this new way.

June 2025

We took a few months to iron out details on how this experiment would work and decided that we would pair off. Clare found a computer program that would partner us at random. The pairings seemed perfect. We took turns creating a piece of work over the course of a month and then we would meet as a group and share the work and then our partners would have a month to create their art piece. We all worked fluidly with timing, holidays, and humanness.

I was partnered with Danielle, an abstract painter from Winnipeg. We both consider ourselves painters first and have a rooted practice in meditation. We connected instantly over our spiritual journeys through our practices. We each rely on intuition and presence to move a work forward. Here are two of our first pieces.

January 2026

A year since we began and each of us has created 4 or 5 works in response to our partners but the focus has been more around our monthly gatherings, sharing about our practices, our lives, our ideas…….and more. It is always interesting to see everyone’s work and hear their narratives.

From the beginning, we have floated around ideas of hosting this work in our various countries. Then Laura found a venue for us during Venice Biennale. We immediately pivoted from partner work and decide to all work in response to each other, jumping into the recurrent themes discussed in our monthly zoom meetings: islands, eyes, mermaids, and fiber. We are a random bunch of women in age, geography, and practice and yet we laughed and agreed with these touch points. Some have chosen to work quite literally with the subjects, while others are finding a looser connection.

February 2026

I have landed on invisibility, my own stretch from “eyes”. This narrative around being unseen started as a tribute to my fellow women in our group. I wanted to validate our experience as artists in the shadows. I wasn’t sure where to start so I looked at my astrological chart. I have never done that before and it was perfect because the symbols feel, well, symbolic to our chosen themes. I interpreted one of planetary bodies as nudging me to use words in my art. It was an immediate knowing and I began sewing words. I simply picked up one of the many sewing needles ( I am a hack seamstress) and some very old painted transparent paper and the words came. Vulnerable words. Here is the first in the series.

July 2026

We are getting ready for our exhibition in October and November of this year in Venice, Italy.

Whispers of Mermaids