Artist in residence: Andrew Godsalve

Andrew Godsalve is an artist and wildlife technician based in Hinton, Alberta. Hinton is a small town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, along the Athabasca River. There Andrew was raised in a family studying wildlife biology. His mother Beth MacCallum runs Bighorn Wildlife Technologies, a small private consulting company that works primarily with the coal mining industry in the Hinton area. They do wildlife surveys on and around open-pit coal mines, making recommendations for how the industry can mitigate their impacts on the wildlife. As a Wildlife Technician, Andrew has learned to read the landscape as to observe the animals and how they inhabit it. This upbringing has had a profound effect on his artistic interests.

Andrew graduated with a BFA from the University of Victoria where he developed a practice of photomontage based on geologic forms and processes. He then took his “geo-photomontage” practice to residencies in Banff, Iceland and the Bay of Fundy, developing projects specific to the particular geologic histories of these regions.

A recent graduate of the MFA program at NSCAD University, Andrew is pleased to be back in Nova Scotia for back-to-back residencies along the Bay of Fundy.

He has just completed his arts residency through the Joggins Fossil Institute’s ArtScape Artist-in-Residence program where he has been working on “Camera Sigillaria”, a project tracing the geo-histories of Cumberland County and now from 1-14 November he will continue the work in Parrsboro through the Main & Station Nonesuch residency program. During this time Andrew will also teach an Artistic Geo-photography Workshop, lead a Geo-montage Walking Tour, and have an exhibition of his photographs. See below for details.