The Grantham Foundation for the Art and the Environment is pleased to announce its winners in creation and ex aequo winners in research for 2022.

Creation Award — Gisèle Trudel and Stéphane Claude (Ælab)

Gisèle Trudel is an artist, professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques and holder of the MÉDIANE Canada Research Chair in Arts, Ecotechnologies of Practice and Climate Change. Stéphane Claude is a sound engineer, composer and researcher in charge of the audio sector at the OBORO artist-run centre. Two main questions underlie their approach and the work they will present at the Foundation. How can research-creation give rise to collaborative endeavours between the arts, sciences and communities so as to establish an ecotechnology of practice emerging in a context of climate change? And how can scientific soil and forest realities be experienced through site-specific immersive art installations?

The Grantham Foundation awards $10,000 to the artists, with a one-month residency at the Foundation.

Pour plus d’information sur Ælab:  aelab.com
Pour plus d’information sur la Chaire MÉDIANE:  https://mediane.uqam.ca

Research Award — Heather Davis

Canadian researcher Heather Davis is a professor at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in New York City. An interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities, media studies and visual culture, Davis has for a number of years focused on the way the saturation of fossil fuels shapes contemporary culture. The residency at the Grantham Foundation will enable her to begin work on a new book titled Petro-Time. 

Davis is co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies (2014), editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (2017) and author of Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022).

The Grantham Foundation awards $5,000 to the researcher, with a one-month residency at the Foundation.

Research Award — Estelle Zhong Mengual

Estelle Zhong Mengual is the holder of the Inhabiting the Landscape Chair at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She looks at the environmental history of art as a counter-history, a potential link between the visual arts and environmental issues, in order to transform our relationship and, more specifically, our sensitivity, to the living world. During her residency at the Grantham Foundation, Zhong Mengual will further explore this perspective with a view to writing and publishing a new work accessible to a wider readership.

Zhong Mengual is the author of Esthétique de la rencontre. L’énigme de l’art contemporain (with Baptiste Morizot), Seuil, 2018, L’Art en commun. Réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique, Presses du réel, 2019 and Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant, Actes Sud, 2021.

The Grantham Foundation awards $5,000 to the researcher, with a one-month residency at the Foundation. 

Led by Johanne Lamoureux, chairholder of the Canada Research Chair in Civic Museology, the jury awarding the scholarships brought together the expertise of Sophie Bélair-Clément, artist and professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Jean-François Bélisle, director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette, Suzanne Paquet, director, Department of Art History and Film Studies of the Université de Montréal and Bénédicte Ramade, art historian, researcher and independent curator specializing in Anthropocene issues.