2024 SECHELT ARTS FESTIVAL
Beginning in 2024, under the guidance of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council, the Sechelt Arts Festival connects art, ecology and climate change. We envision art as a means of calling attention to relationships – to our local ecologies, to our companion communities, and to the land, air and waters that make this part of the world so remarkable and unique. Art has the ability to help us think through difficult ideas through play, joy, community and belonging. It is in dance, theatre and music that we are able to move through and with ideas; it is through the language of visual art that we are able to give form; and it is through words and texts that we shape sometimes incomprehensible ideas. And for many, the climate and our changing natural environment is one of those ideas. The Festival seeks to weave together environmental, cultural and social ideas as a means of inspiring our communities.
THE SALISH SEA
Between September 20 - 30, 2024 we celebrated the Salish Sea – its other-than-human inhabitants, its waterways and estuaries, its stories of travel and exchange, and its vitalness to Sechelt and its communities. Sechelt, as the land between two waters, has been shaped by the Salish Sea – our past, present and future bound to her, despite the increasing challenges of rising waterways and warming oceans.
Hosted at the Chapman Creek/Mission Point Estuary, we presented a series of interconnected events - from a Field School of artists, educators and ecologists learning with the Chapman Creek Estuary, to a series of activities, walks and workshops centering shíshálh ways of knowing the Salish Sea, to a community procession celebrating the equinox, all culminating in a free, out-door festival.
To announce the new Sechelt Arts Festival, we hosted two exhibitions that spoke to the theme of the festival, and its focus on art, ecology and climate change. This allowed us to bring more than 1,100 to the Arts Center to experience GO FISH, an immersive installation by Nettie Wild + Scott Smith. We announced the format of the new SAF, and its celebration of the autumnal equinox on September 21, 2024 at Chapman Creek/Mission Point.
