Sept 27

Suzi Oram-Aylward

Suzi Oram-Aylward (she/they) is an artist and poet based in Unama’ki (Cape Breton). Their work uses sculpture, installation, and participatory poetry to create spaces for connection, reflection, and shared meaning. Working with salvaged and accessible materials, Suzi explores themes of grief, memory, and tenderness as resistance.

Installation

Artist Project

Suzi Oram-Aylward (she/they) is an artist and poet based in Unama’ki (Cape Breton). Their work explores connection, grief, and collective memory through sculpture, installation, and participatory poetry. Using accessible, often salvaged materials,like pill bottles, fabric, and paper scraps, Suzi creates tactile, poetic spaces that invite reflection and co-creation. Their interactive installations, including What Holds Us Together, encourage communities to build constellations of language and meaning, where tenderness becomes resistance and imagination builds bridges. Suzi’s practice honors complexity, shared presence, and the deep human need to connect.

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.