Andrew Thorne

Artist in Residence
2020/2021

I am an interdisciplinary artist and a recent NSCAD BFA graduate. I have lived in Halifax for the last five years, however, my home is Moncton, New Brunswick. During my time at NSCAD, I have become greatly invested in the print-making community, I have served as the department’s student president, and I have organized small exchanges and publications. I am also the cofounder of NSCAD’s Sound Collective, an open group that has organized a variety of shows and performances over the last two years. My practice is deeply rooted in mediums such as intaglio, woodcut and silkscreen, however my work is not limited to print-making. Whether the medium is sound, installation or writing, I am interested in the interrogation of the Canadian media complex and the performance of mass media.

I am interested in materials that hold the capacity to share, and record. My practice is one of recording, through print-making, journaling, audio or collecting, I am looking to gather. It is these collected bits and pieces of our lives that make up the magic of our day to day. We all harvest moments and share gestures of our living. My work concentrates on these shared interactions. I feel as though they connect us to community, as a vast nuanced network of activism and resistance.

Currently, I am most invested in woodcut, particularly soft woods such as pine and birch, as they are a common accessible material. Plywood is a cheap medium, it can show up just about anywhere; boarded windows on old vacant lots, along the fences of construction sites, covering what we don’t want to be seen. As a material, soft woods are a loaded symbol. Forestry is one of the main means of resource-extraction in Canada, the depletion of our forests and other natural resources such as oil, are masked by our major media outlets, which are controlled by corporate interests.