Tangible Fragments – Kara Henry and Michelle Sylvestre

Tangible Fragments – Kara Henry and Michelle Sylvestre

 “The art object is merely a mirror, giving a glimpse that is also a shadow of what was once real, present, concrete.”

 bell hooks (Subversive Beauty: new models of contestation, 1995)

Care as an offering can transmute us. What it requires from us is tedious, tender, arduous, and any other number of adjectives that combine both exhaustion and diligence or love and frustration. The bare intimacy of the person being cared for runs up against the capacity of care givers and their community to tend to them. In that clash of needs and capacity exists a raw experience of what it means to be human. What it means to love.

Tangible Fragments as a body of work grew out of craft processes that parallel/mirror the process and profundity of care work; material qualities tracing shifts of relational transformation. Metabolized through making, different aspects of the caregiving experience became echoed in the material. Equal parts comforting and violent, the action of giving care requires both a puncturing, (a fiery transforming of cells), as much as it does a recovery, (a careful loving handling).

Felt works required agitation and entanglement, washing, rubbing, needling, patience, repetition, slow consistent building and shaping, no short cuts but many variations/paths towards a desired outcome. Ceramic handbuilding asks for a hand touch sensibility, calibrated pressure and careful handling. Atmospheric firing, needs constant and consistent attention and tending, fired in a  proverbial black box of known inputs and hoped for results with ultimately unknown reactions, similar to the body’s reaction to medical treatment and care; hopeful but prone to failure.

These processes locate care in the accumulation of small, repeated acts of attention, adjustment, persistence, and response. Art objects as traces of loving labour repeating motifs of the same; hands in caring action, bodies in need of it, identities changed in the exchange.

Kara Henry  is a multidisciplinary artist honored to live and work on the traditional territories of the Mohkinstsis, or Blackfoot Confederacy. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) and a Bachelor of Education (BEd) from the University of Lethbridge. Kara’s practice is informed by her life experience with chronic illness in dialogue with former roles as an athlete, educator, and coach. Kara has shown work in galleries across western Canada, has completed several curatorial projects.  Kara’s work is rooted in an ongoing exploration of the body’s role in perception, interpretation, and understanding of the world. Her work has evolved from a drawing focused practice, exploring the visual expression of mental and emotional processing of relationships and social structures, into a drawing-informed sculptural approach.

ichelle Sylvestre holds a BFA in Art (2017) and an MFA in New Media (2021) from the University of Lethbridge, located on Treaty 7 Territory, Alberta. Currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought, her research investigates systemic heteropatriarchal and colonial biases in artificial intelligence (AI). As an interdisciplinary artist, Sylvestre’s public art and exhibition work often examine identity and community through installation, sculpture, and performance. She works across textiles, ceramics, video, audio, and found objects, allowing the material language of each work to emerge from its conceptual foundation.  Sylvestre is a Researcher in Residence with the Indigenous-led Abundance Intelligence Niitsitapi Pod at the Centre for Indigenous Art, Research, and Technology(CIART), and she teaches in the New Media Department as a sessional instructor at the University of Lethbridge. She is honoured to be the first student from the University of Lethbridge to be awarded the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship.

Date:September 5th, 2026  -  October 23rd, 2026

Location:Casa - Main Gallery

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