Anchor Points of the Heart

Ranger has over 14 years of experience in program direction at Place des artistes de Farrellton, where she developed exhibitions, residencies, and community-engaged initiatives, and previously served as an active director and occasional president on its board. She has exhibited and facilitated projects across the Outaouais region, emphasizing participatory and site-responsive approaches.

She is currently expanding her work in immersive installation integrating fibre, environment, and digital elements. Ranger studied Anthropology at Carleton University and attended the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design; her felting knowledge is rooted in mentorship and self-directed learning.

Andrée Préfontaine holds a graduate diploma in music from Montréal University and a Master’s degree in Arts Practice at UQAM. She has performed in recitals, recordings, radio broadcasts and played with various ensembles and orchestras. She has linked music, visual arts, and media arts by establishing close relationships between images and sound in her works.
Her works have been presented at festivals and galleries such as Les Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois, Clermont-Ferrand, Galerie B-312, Eastern Bloc, Axeneo7, La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines and many other Quebec, Canadian, and European venues and she has received numerous awards. Her works are part of private collections. She is currently working on drawing on film and a filmed landscape as well as a sound environment related to the project.

Visual artist, researcher, mentor, cj works at the intersection of placemaking, collaboration and systems change; welcoming non-artists into large-scale projects that link human spirit and aha moments to agency in public space.  Since the 90s, her practice has been braided into hives of grief, labour, ecology, education, immigration, feminist law, healthcare, and forestcare.  Equally diverse in scale and media; her art has been expressed through stone, flower petals, bronze, performance, video, projected light, and 20 permanent public commissions, including: CEGEP Heritage’s entrance wall, Little Italy’s 15 granite and bronze sculptures along Preston Street, the Women’s Monument Against Violence in Ottawa, and the Blair LRT station.  As Artist-in-Residence at Bruyère, she co-founded Radical Connections with Dr. Carol Wiebe, bringing artists of all kinds into the lives of people in care; now continuing through Ottawa Art Gallery.  

Thoma Ewen has been exploring the beauty and mystery of tapestry weave for over 50 years, working from her studio at Moon Rain Centre for Textile Arts in the Gatineau Hills.

“My work is a visual exploration of the forces or energies that move through everything on and beyond the planet. Light is an important element and source of inspiration. Weaving is a contemporary metaphor for the interconnections between all living systems of our biosphere.”

Thoma’s intuitive visual explorations begin with pastel drawings, which are transformed on the loom into radiant hand-woven tapestry, interweaving light, colour and energy. Her tapestries are created in a meditative process, meant to inspire awakening and awareness in the viewer.

Thoma has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, United States, England, France, Ireland, Poland,Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela and China.  Her most recent solo exhibition, Le Tissage et Le Temps , 2025, was a retrospective at Galerie Montcalm in Gatineau. She is curator and a participating artist in the collective, Woven By Hand: Contemporary Canadian Tapestries that recently was presented at MUMAQ in Montreal 2026. 

Thoma collaborates with daughter and textile artist Gabby Ewen, in directing Moon Rain Centre’s community arts projects and events like La Triennale Internationale des Arts Textiles en Outaouais (2010, 2013, 2016), which have made textile arts visible and accepted as contemporary art in the region and beyond. 

Thoma is the author of The Living Tapestry Workbook, a beginner’s guide 

to designing and weaving tapestry.

John Eaton was born in Ottawa in 1942. He attended High Mowing School in New England, with special emphasis on painting and drawing. For three years following this he travelled in Europe, working in Yugoslavia and Greece and as an apprentice to a marble sculptor in Florence, Italy.

From 1961 to 1967 he had a studio in New York and taught drawing at the Waldorf School of Adelphi University. During this period, his pictures were used for multi-media poetry and dance recitals at the Lincoln Centre, the Donnell Library and the Cubiculo Theatre, New York. In 1965 he illustrated “Fairy Tales” by E.E. Cummings published by Harcourt, Brace and World. In 1967 he assisted with the murals in the Pan-Am Building in New York.

In the late sixties, John Eaton moved to Rupert, Quebec, renewing his connection to the Gatineau Hills and pursue his vocation as an artist for many years. In 2015, with the help of his partner, he started to work daily on his biography and cataloguing his life’s work. His sudden death by a heart attack, while riding his mountain bike with his horse Goya on his land came to a shock to everyone that loved him. His spirit now rests peacefully at home, at the farm, surrounded by all the beauty that animated and inspired him during his entire lifetime. His legacy will echo in the Gatineau Hills eternally.

owen tuf is a visual and performance artist, movement educator and expressive arts practitioner based in Wakefield, qc. Her visual art path includes markmaking through somatic practices, voice, and relationship with the natural world.  The life source for this work is in seeking creative and embodied resilience for individuals and for communities.

With themes of domestic ritual, ephemeral materials and collaboration with environmental elements, owen’s work focuses on fortifying the bridges we have between the dreaming and the workaday mind.  Her training in sculpture and installation with fibres is influenced by further studies in Body Mind Centering, Process Work,  Somatics of Presence.

Current projects explore dance partners in the natural environment where we live, the role of grief in our modern world of attainment and consumption, setting a world record for packing and moving studio spaces and how to make a living by both creating content and concealing it from the ravages of the internet.

Iris Kiewiet is a Dutch-Canadian artist working and living in Wakefield QC Canada. She received her bachelors in Arts & Illustration from Academie Minerva in Groningen The Netherlands and is currently in the masters program ‘Museologie & Pratique des Arts’ at UQO in Gatineau.

Kiewiet grew up in The Netherlands, where legends and mythology were told around the ocean and the land. In her early career she worked as an entrepreneur illustrator with book publishers and newspapers magazines and was a part-time professor at Hanze University Minerva. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and is part of private collections in both The Netherlands and Canada.

Teaching, collaborations and community projects developed alongside her artist practice. Kiewiet received grants from CALQ ‘Between Myth and Reality’ in 2009; from Fonds de recherche du Quebec for ‘Up Close or Nearby’ in 2020, a collective participatory art project where she created a mural at the Wakefield Spring. 

In her ongoing  collaboration ‘Spirit Beading & Beading your Story’ through both STO Union and Theatre Wakefield, she works with artists, storytellers and community on a textile collective art piece. In 2019 Kiewiet made drawings for ‘Whisperings’, short stories by Ilse Turnsen.

In her current masters program she researches the question ‘How does the ecology of care systems influence the artist practice as a reciprocitive environment’. Her participation in many roots up and established cultural initiatives evolve around nature, wellness and art, including various age groups.