Meet our insrtructors

Biography:

Joanne Churchill has always been surrounded by art, creativity and self-expression. As a graduate of Art History and Business for the Fine and Performing Arts, she has spent 20+ years ensuring professional performing artists for young audiences had opportunities to perform in schools and communities throughout Ontario, while keeping her own creativity packed away in her back pocket. Once the Covid-19 shut the doors on the cultural sector, Joanne turned the pandemic lockdown into a gift of time and opportunity and became determined to put all her energies into exploring her own creativity rather than promoting other artists. While the world was making sour-dough bread and knitting, Joanne returned to her first passion of painting and learned intuitive painting by Flora Bowley, mixed-media by Tracey Verdugo, Cordula Kagemann, Laura Horn and Lorna Crane.  From these explorations, Joanne found a love for collage, monoprinting, photo transferring, mark-making, stencil and stamp making. Joanne manipulates and abstracts images from everyday objects found while traveling, exploring nature and everyday life and then creates multi-layered, mixed-media collages that inspire contemplation, exploration and meditation.

Description of Personal Artwork/Style:

Joanne Churchill uses various mixed media for her expressive abstract artwork. Her process includes using various types of acrylic and watercolour paint and ink as well hand-painted collage paper to create rich, multi-layered surface textures. Additional monoprinting (the technique of printmaking where the image is only printed once), photo transfers (of people, plants, places and unique objects), and hand-made stencils and stamps (fashioned out of found and upcycled objects and household items) are all added to the composition to give each piece a sense of dimension and uniqueness.  Each mixed media collage has a personal connection to both emotions and images experienced while on the artist’s travels, walks in nature, and everyday life.