Presented in partnership with Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, the Art Gallery of Swift Current will host artists Aurora Wolfe and Melanie Monique Rose for a mini-residency at Saskatchewan Landing from August 1-7.
Uplifting the vital land-based practices of Saskatchewan artists, the Art Gallery of Swift Current is pleased to launch an arts engagement project within the unique environs of Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park. Participating artists, Aurora Wolfe and Melanie Monique Rose will connect to the land and its histories, explore their art practices in relation to the site, build collaborative inter-relationships, and share learning experiences with a local Elder, while also implementing their work as a tool to connect the public with land-based concepts and practice.
Join the artists at the Goodwin House at Saskatchewan Landing for the following workshops:
Saturday August 2, 1pm
Botanical Silk Scarf Workshop with Melanie Rose
Join artist and visual storyteller Melanie Monique Rose to make our one-of-a-kind wearable artwork. Together we will learn bundle dye and eco-printing techniques to create our own bandana or scarf. Melanie will share her knowledge about native dye plants and natural dyeing. Learn more about Melanie’s land based art practice, while creating and taking home your own colour story from the land!
Sunday, August 3, 1pm
Sun-Printing Workshop with Aurora Wolfe
Join us in the heart of southern Saskatchewan for a hands-on sun printing workshop that blends creativity, sustainability, and the beauty of the prairie landscape. Using foraged local plants and recycled materials, participants will explore the art of cyanotype—a historic photographic process that uses sunlight to create striking blue-and-white prints. Come connect with the land, experiment with natural shapes and textures, and leave with your own one-of-a-kind artwork. No experience necessary—just curiosity and a love for the outdoors! Youths under 14 must accompanied by an adult.
Sunday August 3, 7pm
Campfire Artist Talk with Aurora Wolfe
Aurora Wolfe is a multimedia artist, researcher, and musician of Cree (Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation) and Scottish descent. Her work centers on the relationships between Indigeneity and institutions, teasing out stories that have been overshadowed by the dominant colonial narrative. She holds an interest in exploring dynamic relationality and creating art that generates acts of kinship with the past, present, and future.
Grounded within lived experience, her works dance between mediums, genres, and disciplines. Blending a tongue-in-cheek sensibility with historical reference, she unravels what it means to be displaced, and the simple yet complicated rituals of return. Alongside acts of truth-telling, aesthetics serve as both an entry point for viewers and a weapon against the fetishization of Indigenous pain. Through this lens, she firmly locates us in the here and now, and within our own complexities as living, feeling, and interactive beings.
Monday, August 4, 7pm
Campfire Artist Talk with Melanie Rose
Melanie Monique Rose is a Metis/Ukrainian visual artist from Regina, Saskatchewan Treaty 4 Territory, a citizen of the Metis Nation of Saskatchewan, and a long-time contributing member of Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective Inc. and board member. Rose’s work centres on kinship and relationships between the land, ourselves and each other. Through plants and flowers Rose invites transmissions of ancestral knowledge and teachings while also imagining and creating a de-colonial future through the lens of Metis worldviews.
She attended Kootenay School of the Arts with a major in the Fibre Arts in Nelson, B.C. Rose has exhibited her artwork in both group and solo exhibitions. Most recently, Melanie has her largest showing of work to date in her solo show, Li moond di fleur at the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford Ontario. In the summer of 2023 Melanie’s natural dye practice took her to both Ottawa, at the National Gallery of Canada and Santa Fe, New Mexico’s SWAIA Fashion shows, where her work walked the runway. A recent career highlight was exhibiting in the group show, Storied Objects/Metis Art in Relation at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A great honor was to receive the distinction of Excellence in Textiles from the Saskatchewan Craft Council in Dimension’s 2013 touring show. In 2020, Melanie was named a CBC Future 40 for her work in arts and culture. In addition, she was one of seven artists awarded the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts Endowment Award to further artistic pursuits in 2021. In 2023 she was honored with the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal from His Honour the Honourable Russ Mirasty Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan for her work in Arts & Reconciliation. Most recently she was awarded the 2025 Indigenous Resurgence in Action category for the Regina YWCA Women of Distinction.
This project is made possible through the SK Arts’ Artists in Communities grant and with support from Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park.
