
Honorary Member
Toronto-based multi-media artist Margie Kelk takes an exploratory and experimental approach as she appropriates and reconstructs visual fragments of ideas through diverse media that include ceramic, bronze and aluminium sculpture, drawing, painting, and animation.
Margie Kelk is a graduate of Wellesley College, the Johns Hopkins University (PhD.), and the Toronto School of Art diploma programme.
UnderSee (2018), an animated film co-directed by Margie Kelk and Lynne Slater has been screened in over seventy-five film festivals nationally and internationally including the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California, USA; Beyond the Curve International Film Festival, Hôtel Paris Lafayette, Paris, France; the Portugal International Film Festival at the Pestana Palacio do Freixo, Porto, Portugal and the International Shorts Film Festival, Melbourne, Australia.
Margie Kelk’s first award-winning stop-motion animated film, Substratae (2015) has been featured in over seventy film festivals nationally and internationally including The New Renaissance Film Festival, London, UK; and the New York State International Film Festival, in Albany, New York.
Trips to Antarctica over the past two years informed my current artistic output. Inspired by the geography, flora and fauna found in South Georgia Island and the Antarctic peninsula, I studied scientific reports about the feasibility of life continuing under the adverse conditions brought on by climate change in these regions. Scientists have not yet discovered all of the possible life forms living in the southern oceans, and they are not sure how current life forms may adapt to the changing conditions. I am creating my own series of possible life forms in the hopes that something may survive.
Margie Kelk