Sept 26

Chelsey Butts

Chelsey Butts is a lifelong creative, Cape Breton artist, writer, and individual volunteer with the Cape Breton Feminist Society. She holds BSW and BACS degrees. Her practice explores safety, justice, and collective responsibility through poetry, visual art, and participatory installation. This project was developed independently with CBFS volunteer support.

The Cape Breton Feminist

Community Project

DISCIPLINE Participatory installation / community-engaged art

What Does Safety Look Like? asks: What does safety look like to you—and whose metamorphosis are we demanding: survivors, or the systems that have failed to keep them safe?

This illuminated, participatory installation invites visitors to respond anonymously, through words or drawings, to questions of safety, justice, solidarity, and collective responsibility. As responses are added to an initially empty clothesline, the space transforms into a glowing collective display, shifting the expectation for survivors to adapt outward toward the systems and communities that must change.

Lumière Arts Festival 2026 // Metamorphosis

Lumière invites artists to explore transformations, growth, and renewal —across beings, identities, societies, and materials – through the lens of artistic expression. In the chrysalis phase, change is unseen, mysterious, and full of possibilities. Artists are invited to create/present works that examine shifts in personal identity, explore adaptation or environmental cycles and the transformation of objects and materials, highlighting not just beginnings or endings, but the unfolding of the process itself.

The Metamorphosis theme delves into the ongoing process of transformation from one life stage to another. Like renewal processes in nature, change unfolds in phases, some visible, and some hidden. How do we hold space for the unknown phases in between growth and reemergence? How do we honour the process of becoming?

In response to an ever changing world, the festival offers a space to reflect on how we adapt, change, and evolve. The festival is a space for collective transformation and activation of unconventional spaces into interactive and imaginative art installations.

Lumière asks: How does art mirror transformations? What guides us forward through unknown processes of becoming? In the glow of shared experience, we celebrate the beauty of metamorphosis, the mystery of the chrysalis, and the endless possibilities of becoming.

Land Acknowledgement

Lumière Arts Festival, on behalf of the board, the artists, and the communities we represent, acknowledges that we work, live and play in the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, in Unama’ki Cape Breton, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.

We are grateful not only for the strong and ongoing stewardship of these lands we call home, but also for the stories, music, and art that Mi’kmaq people continue to create and share, carrying ancestral voices, sacred teachings, and legacies of interconnectedness and resilience forward into the present and on to the future.

We aspire to reflect that sense of connection between past and present in our festival. We are inspired by L’nu artists to foster connection and self-reflection in our work. We will work to ensure that art is accessible, inclusive, and integrated into public spaces so that we can share our collective stories, recognizing the challenges of our past and imagining brighter futures.

We are all Treaty people.