Over the past year and a half, Victoria-based artists Jennifer Lea Horn, Ellen Pelto, and Anisa Skuce-Newell have developed a collaborative studio practice investigating the relationship between individual authorship, collective making, and material process. Working with handmade cotton and abaca paper, the three artists use fibre, surface, layering, gesture, and mark-making to test what happens when distinct artistic languages enter sustained dialogue.
The handmade paper itself has become both material and collaborator. Through experimentation with fibre, surface, texture, layering and mark-making, the artists explore how individual gestures can accumulate, intersect, respond to one another and become part of a collective work. Their process embraces dialogue, chance, discovery, and the unexpected, asking how creative decisions change when made in relationship with others.
The resulting works explore not only paper and mark, but the possibilities of collaboration itself: how individual voices can remain distinct while contributing to something shared, and how a material process can become a space for connection, exchange, collective discovery, and authorship. Through this ongoing exchange, the artists are interested in collaboration not as a method for producing consensus, but as a way of creating conditions for difference, uncertainty, reciprocity, and emergence.
The Artists
Anisa Skuce Newell
Anisa Skuce Newell is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between sculpture, installation, fibre, paper, video, performance, and community-based art. Her work is rooted in curiosity—a willingness to enter into a material, a place, or a collaboration and discover what might emerge.
With an MFA in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Anisa has developed a practice that is as much about process and connection as it is about the finished work. Materials become a language through which ideas can take shape, shift, and unfold. Her work often inhabits the spaces between disciplines, bringing together visual art, movement, music, theatre, performance, and the voices of others.
Collaboration is central to this way of working. For Anisa, making art can be an act of gathering—bringing people, materials, stories, and imagination into a shared space. Her collaborative projects have involved artists, musicians, performers, students, children, families, and entire neighbourhoods. Since 2015, her Neighbourhood Artworks projects in Victoria have transformed everyday community spaces through murals, gardens, installations, fabric portraits, and other participatory works. These projects reflect her belief in communities’ creative potential and the value of making art together.
Her multidisciplinary projects have ranged from intimate site-specific installations to large-scale performances involving more than 100 participants. She has collaborated with composers, choreographers, filmmakers, actors, dancers, and musicians, including a video and orchestral work created with Anna Hostman and the Victoria Symphony. Her visual work has been exhibited across Canada as well as in Scotland and France.
Movement runs through Anisa’s practice: between the individual and the collective, the planned and the unexpected, the material and the imagined. She is drawn to the possibility that something new can arise when we remain open—to the material in our hands, to the presence of others, and to the discoveries that happen along the way.
For Anisa, art is not simply an object or an outcome. It is a way of paying attention, of making connections, and of allowing something to unfold.
Ellen Pelto
Ellen Pelto is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in observation, exploration, and a deep curiosity about what lies beneath the surface. Her work draws on an ongoing engagement with texture, layering, fragments, and the subtle traces left by time, place, and the natural world.
Based in Victoria, British Columbia, Ellen has developed her artistic practice through sustained study, workshops, residencies, and a commitment to ongoing learning and experimentation. Her background in English Literature, education, curriculum studies, and studio art brings together an appreciation for visual language and the ways meaning is discovered, constructed, and revealed.
The themes that appear throughout Ellen’s exhibition history speak to an enduring fascination with layers and revelation. Titles such as Beyond the Surface, Hidden Fragments: Layers of Discovery, PaperScapes, and Tafoni: Coastal Influence and Tafoni: Weathering suggest a practice attentive to the marks of time and the processes that shape both natural and human-made surfaces. There is a sense of looking closely—of noticing what might otherwise remain unseen.
Her connection to the West Coast is also reflected in her exploration of coastal influence and weathering. The landscape becomes more than a subject; it offers a way of thinking about erosion, accumulation, change, resilience, and the passage of time. Surfaces can hold memory. Fragments can suggest a larger story. What is concealed can become as compelling as what is immediately visible.
Ellen’s ongoing artistic development reflects a generous willingness to remain a student of her own practice. Through workshops with established artists and a residency at McLoughlin Gardens, she continues to expand her understanding of materials and process, allowing new influences and discoveries to enter her work.
A quiet attentiveness lies at the heart of Ellen’s practice. She invites us to slow down, to look again, and to consider the beauty that can emerge through layering, fragmentation, weathering, and time. Her work reminds us that what appears to be a simple surface may hold many histories—and that sometimes the most intriguing discoveries lie just beneath what we first see.
Jennifer Lea Horn
Jennifer Lea Horn is a multidisciplinary artist based in Victoria, British Columbia, whose creative practice moves between visual art, music, and writing. At the heart of her work is a desire to observe, interpret, and communicate—to find visual and creative languages for ideas, feelings, and perspectives that are not always easily expressed in words.
Jennifer studied Vocal Performance and Composition at Grant McEwan University, building a musical foundation that continues to inform how she approaches visual art. Rhythm, gesture, atmosphere, and improvisation move across disciplines, creating a practice that is fluid rather than confined to a single medium.
Her visual work moves between the intimacy and immediacy of ink, watercolour, and gouache illustration and the more intuitive language of mixed-media abstraction. In her abstract work, charcoal, acrylic, and oil become tools for exploration—allowing marks, textures, colour, and gesture to interact and evolve. There is a willingness to follow the work rather than predetermine its destination, allowing meaning to emerge through the process of making.
Jennifer’s creative life has also included original songwriting and writing. Her 2003 album Shelf Life brought together her original music, while her 2010 creative writing project, Picture, Picture, on a Blog, explored another form of personal expression and invited her audience to work collaboratively with her. Her continued engagement with drawing, painting, and urban sketching reflects an artist who is curious about the many ways we see and make sense of the world.
Observation is an important thread in Jennifer’s practice. Whether capturing something recognizable through line and colour or moving into abstraction through spontaneous mark-making, she is interested in the act of looking—and in what happens when looking becomes interpretation.
Within the trio, Jennifer brings an instinct for gesture, rhythm, colour, and visual storytelling. Her practice is comfortable with both the observed and the imagined, the deliberate and the intuitive. Like music, her approach allows space for variation, response, and unexpected turns.
For Jennifer, making is a form of conversation: between the artist and the material, between one mark and the next, and between what is seen and what is felt. Her work invites the possibility that meaning need not be fixed—that it can shift, resonate, and reveal itself gradually through the act of making.