Certain Age Collective

Detail: "Cat's Cradle," 2026, collaborative mixed media assemblage

Certain Age Collective is a group of five older Canadian female artists, aged 61-75, based in two provinces. We are: Chrystene Ells, Laura Hargrave, Sheila Nourse, Loretta Paoli, and Anne Vaasjo.

Meeting to alleviate isolation during the pandemic lockdown, we have continued to connect online for the past five years. Together we have about 200 years of contemporary visual art practice. The continuing explorations, critical discourse, and feedback within the group have led to our first collaborative project, All Over The Place. Our second collaborative project, Letting Go, is currently in progress and will be shared here soon.

our collaborative art making process

We each send out the beginnings of a piece to be rotated until every artist has the opportunity to add their contribution. We allow about one month for each transfer so a series is finished in just under 6 months.

The last participant delivers the finalized work back to the first sender who becomes the owner and namer of the piece

Create, 2026, collaborative mixed media collage, work in progress

We work blind in that we do not know what we will receive nor do we share what has been sent out to others. Therefore the packages are always unexpected, sometimes like Christmas and sometimes like WTF. It's similar to the game of Telephone, where your whispered message morphs into something completely unforseen. Drawing on our backgrounds and creativity, we transform, but do not disregard, the original perceived intent. Only at the end point, when everyone has had a turn, do we all see the final result. It is a challenging, playful, free-wheeling process.

REFLECTION

If art may be thought of as having significant form and authentic meaning, how can five distanced collaborators meet this goal, when it is already difficult for individual visual artists to achieve?

Felix Gonzalez-Torres said, “Meaning is created once something can be related to personal experience.”(1) We draw on shared lifelong experiences: our generation, gender, artistic education, art practices, and basic values. These produce resonances as each piece is moved along. So in our case the initial personal experience not only exists but is played forward.

And let’s not forget the underlying trust and empathy necessary to build successful collaborations. We work from a foundation of understood mutual respect. Our pieces work through each artist carefully attempting to honour the previous artists' offerings, then building on that work, while contributing our own craft processes, aesthetic sensibilities, and beliefs. In spite of the fractured production method, the final works, though sometimes twisted surprises, embody true meaning.

FlashArt, 1991

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