Solastalgia: Addressing Climate Anxiety through Community Building and Art-Making — Session 2: Making Art Public

Join RAVEN for session 2 of our summer series addressing climate grief through community and art making. In this session, our collective ideas will be transformed into vibrant public art. We’ll be taking the insights and inspiration from our zine-making workshop and bringing them to life through a collaborative piece of art that we will bring to the public. 

What to expect: For session 2, we are going out into the community, as we take our ideas from session 1 and turn them into a temporary public mural in Fernwood Square. Because we will be outside in the beautiful summer sun, make sure to bring water, wear sunscreen, and take breaks as needed. There are also some accessibility aspects to note, as the temporary mural will be on the ground, so to participate in the painting, you will need to bend over, crouch, or sit on the ground at some point throughout the session. If this isn’t accessible to you, we still would love for you to stop by, contribute your ideas to the conversations, and take up space in public together!  We invite everyone to attend, whether you came to session 1 or not. All skill levels are welcome as the mural making will be led by the RAVEN Communications team, and artist, Coulee Ross.

This interactive art-making event invites us all to communicate with the wider community that we are not alone — and that together we can take action for our collective futures. The day will begin with a short moment to connect and be in conversation with each other on the theme of reimagining collective futures — and re-rooting into the idea that we can respond to our climate grief with connection and imagination. We will then co-create a piece of public art. 

Copies of the zine from Session 1 will be available on-site.

The mural we will be working on will have space for collaboration, but will have a baseline design done by Coulee Ross.

Details

Location: Little Fernwood Gallery, Victoria, B.C. & Fernwood Square

Date and Time: August 24, 2025, from 10 am – 1 pm

What to expect — (note, you do not have to stay for the entire time – you can drop in and out through the event):

10:00: doors, tea, coffee, snacks made available

10:30: Introduction to activity, reflections from previous session

10:45-12:45 – Mural Painting

12:45-1:00 closing thoughts

1:00-1:15 – clean up and goodbyes

Artist bio: Coulee Ross is a nêhiyaw iskwêw (Cree woman) from Peepeekisis Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory and a citizen of the Métis Nation of BC. She is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and story-weaver working at the intersections of Indigenous futurism, felt history, and narrative alchemy. Her practice spans visual arts, immersive listening, spatial storytelling, political aesthetics, and place-based methodologies—centering community memory and future possibility through collaborative creation.

Recently, Coulee completed an artist residency at Rockslide Gallery and curated a multi-day Storytellers Festival that foregrounded Indigenous narrative practice, relational ethics, and temporal fluidity. Her work draws on tactile media, cartographic imagination, and participatory installation to activate story as both a vessel and a method of transformation.

She is the creator of the Something Else Universe, an expanding transmedia world that invites us to reimagine reality through Indigenous ways of knowing, feeling, and being. Her original methodologies—including Liminal Story Weaving, Unstorying, and Futuration—are grounded in the belief that stories are alive, and transforming story is a form of liberation.

Coulee’s current projects include Liminal Frequencies, a speculative radio collaboration with UMFM exploring how vibration, imagination, and Indigenous frequency can carry futures through the air. Her practice invites others to consider storytelling not as content, but as consciousness. Not as performance, but as portal. Not as escape, but as return.