Jacqueline Blanchard

Jacqueline is an entrepreneur, artist and designer born and raised in Cape Breton. She has been a self-employed designer for 7 years and has recently reignited her art practice. Her work focuses on themes of emotional experiences, spirituality, wellness, nature and gathering. Her work is intended to provoke thinking differently and a collective oneness. She explores the mediums of drawing, painting, digital collage, and illustration.

Unnatural: Collective Resistance

Artist Project

Unnatural: Collective Resistance’ is a series of drawings that explore the theme of resisting to ‘bloom’ or ‘emerge’ as a natural reaction to oppressive forces. Thoughts and worries were collected anonymously from the public and used in these pieces to demonstrate the collective resistance or anxiety that many people feel reemerging after many months of lockdowns and limited social contact. This is an interpretation of how our everyday worries, or more serious anxieties, around existing in an ongoing pandemic are a collective experience and not only individual, though isolation may leave us feeling otherwise.

Lumiere Arts Festival 2024 // The Art of Caring

Lumiere Arts Festival invites artists and community members to reflect on the concept of care.

In a polarized landscape, care can lap like a brook, or pound like large waves crashing ashore. To care is to tend, to root, to rebel, to share and to endure. This year, the festival is encouraging artists to submit works rooted in solidarity, with community building as resistance, that explores the need to care for ourselves, others, and the earth, both locally and globally. The Lumiere Arts Festival makes space for joy, contemporary art, and meaningful dialogue.

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.