When Samantha Wigglesworth was nine, she begged a teacher to let her into a group art class geared for ages 12 and up.
Donna Folk was a Bob Ross-certified painting instructor — one of only a few in Canada at the time — and lived in Wigglesworth’s hometown of Fort St. John.
“I was too young for the class, but I talked my way in,” Wigglesworth remembered.
And after a few sessions in Folk’s converted garage, Wigglesworth was invited to her studio for classes.
For seven years, Wigglesworth practiced the basics of landscape oil painting under Folk’s guidance twice a month: how to mix paints, how to hold a paint brush, etc.; however, at 16, she stopped to focus on drawing and animé.
When Grade 12 came, Wigglesworth looked around and wondered where her art could take her in the northern B.C. town. There wasn’t much choice back then, she said, so Wigglesworth headed south. “I wanted to learn,” she said.
She enrolled in the fine arts degree program at the University of Fraser Valley (UFV) in Abbotsford, staying with friends and family in Chilliwack, and explored other visual arts streams and mediums.
She returned home for a year when the COVID-19 pandemic hit then moved to Abbotsford for her final year at UFV where she continued to hone her talents in acrylic portraiture.
Wigglesworth also signed up with the Abbotsford Arts Council, which publishes a resource list for members to bid on grants and artistic opportunities around the Lower Mainland.
That’s when the Kwi Am Choi scholarship application popped up.
Named after a well-known painter from Port Moody who died in a hiking accident in 2006, the $2,000 scholarship promotes two emerging young artists annually and allows space to exhibit at PoMoArts, an arts venue on St. Johns Street.
Wigglesworth didn’t know anything about the late painter, but thought she would give the application a try.
Last year, she won the award, along with Kosar Movahedi, and, in January, started creating a series designed to shake up her regular portrait craft.
“I was seeing that I was over-blending my portraits,” she told the Tri-City News today, Aug. 7.
“I really needed a different approach because I could see I was losing the texture […] I needed something to loosen me up, so I branched out with the balloon series.”
Titled Reflections of Societal Expectations, her scholarship collection features seven works she painted this year focusing on coloured foil balloons — a symbol of the fragility between authenticity and societal pressures. For example, the shiny and metallic outer layers represent what someone looks like on the outside, but may feel differently inside.
The distorted self-portraits, most of them in star-shaped balloons to mimic a mirror, are meant to reflect public presentations and expectations through social media: her bright red balloon evokes confidence, her blue balloon highlights despair while her gold balloon is about perception.
“There’s so much pressure on people, especially young people, to look and act a certain way,” Wigglesworth said, adding she wants her pieces to also explore gender and sexuality realities rather than judgment.
Wigglesworth said temporarily switching up her artistic direction “made such a difference” to her portraiture work; she’s now painting a series that she hopes to exhibit this fall thanks to funding from the BC Arts Council.
As well, next month, she’ll be starting her master’s degree in visual arts at UBC Okanagan with the aim to become a professor or full-time professional artist.
Reflections of Societal Expectations can be seen in the Beedie Living Gallery at PoMoArts (2425 St. Johns St.) until Sept. 1, 2024, along with works from artists also showcasing pieces about inner identities:
- Sculpted Eden by Georgia Fitton, PoMoArts’ ceramic artist-in-residence 2023–24
- Ann Kitching Gallery
- Milestones, a PoMoArts’ student exhibition
- Canadian Pacific Gallery
