CHANDRA BARNETT
Chandra Barnett is a professional artist currently living in Sault Ste. Marie, Algoma. While she was born a Saultite, much of her youth was spent in Thunder Bay, ON, and Montreal, QC, where she pursued a life immersed in the arts. She has been fortunate to have always possessed a creative mind and curious spirit, and has found great inspiration for her work and practice through travel, diverse populations, social activism, and her own community. It is through lived experience that she has found a willingness to grow and connect within her practice and out in her community allowing for her style and choice of medium of expression to change and evolve over time. Through her work she is able to express what is personally meaningful to her in her daily life.
Since moving to the Algoma region in 2007, Chandra has become a mother, earned her Digital Imaging and Photography diploma with honours from Sault College (2013), and developed an award-winning photographic practice. Her work has appeared in Applied Arts Magazine and been featured in community-based projects including Thinking Rock Community Arts and Youth Social Infrastructure (YSI) Collaborative. As a founding contributor to the ArtSpeaks Project, she has helped design and lead non-clinical, trauma-informed art programming since 2017, as well as creating Mamafesto Magazine, a grassroots publication with international readership (2012).
More recently, Chandra has focused her practice on discovering a new voice of expression. Now in recovery, seeking new pathways to self-discovery, she has come to understand through opportunities to lead and participate in community based arts and programming that art is a language that speaks across cultures and experiences. She hopes to continue to extend her community work by applying her art-based healing experience and knowledge in an open, learning and multicultural setting.
As Chandra’s personal practice continues to evolve, she is excited and curious about what lies ahead and the opportunities that will present themselves; undoubtedly reshaping and shifting her practice over and over again like a river to its shoreline. This past few years have brought about great waves of change in her life creating a dialectic atmosphere of lightness and loss; contemplating notions of doing versus being. “It is challenging for us all, in this time of hi-tech and uncertainty, to be present and stay grounded.” She wonders how we will utilize the natural elements to rediscover balance, and how this can be maintained.
