Free Public Lecture - Betty Carpick & Julie Cosgrove – A Record of Time: Chronicling McVicar Creek Through Art

Join the Thunder Bay Museum for the October presentation of our 2026–2027 Free Public Lecture series as we welcome Julie Cosgrove and Betty Carpick for an exploration of "A Record of Time: Chronicling McVicar Creek Through Art"

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Webinar ID: 875 9800 8184

Description:

Centring around McVicar Creek’s wild, hybrid, and built spaces, artists Julie Cosgrove and Betty Carpick spent two years rambling and making handmade art materials to capture time, data, and a land-based artwork. Their 2026 installation at the CoLab Gallery replicated the creek’s flow while playing with scale, fluidity, transparencies and layers, surface materials, mark-making elements, and the elusiveness of naturally coloured inks made from materials they gathered from the urban waterway.

Presenter Bio:

Julie Cosgrove is a Francophone visual artist working predominantly in painting. She's exhibited internationally and nationally and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her experiences as a canoe and kayak guide in the James Bay watershed are a central influence. Julie’s affinity with the subtle shifts in travelling with the land are integrated into exploring abstraction and weaving ideas of landscape, mapping, and navigation. Her large-scale compositions consider place and space through composition, colour, line, layering and depth. As an artist, collaborator, educator, juror, and board member, she’s contributed to many arts organizations.

Betty Carpick grew up in far northern Manitoba. The interdisciplinary and intergenerational ways that she makes art and offers stewardship are shaped by her Cree and Eastern European upbringing. Her family’s lived experience with the permanent devastation of the Churchill River watershed amplifies how she uses art to hold conversations. As a land-based artist, educator, activist, and community-arts practitioner, much of her work looks at social, cultural, and environmental issues by creating art that exists in the space between process and performance as well as the missing portions between the real and the imagined.

About the Free Public Lecture Series

The Thunder Bay Museum’s Free Public Lecture series explores a wide range of topics connected to the history, people, communities, environment, and culture of Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario.

Lectures are generally held on the fourth Tuesday of each month from September through March and are free and open to the public.

For those attending in person, light refreshments will be served following the presentation.