CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION
“I've never travelled on celestial circles, But feel the pull of the track” Powers, by Jennifer Castle
This work will be an animation-based installation with audio interviews with astrologers exploring the question: what is the role of astrological divination in a world in the depths of a climate crisis? In other words: why envision the future when the idea of a future feels more and more far-fetched, uninhabitable, or even hostile? The animations will be images that move hypnotically from one image to the next, giving the viewer room to interpret what they see. The imagery will be fluid and abstracted and will loosely respond to the content of the audio interviews, though the audio interviews and animation will not be synced up. The animations will visually mimic scrying: a divination practice that employs gazing into a dark reflective surface in dim lighting to receive a transmission of images.
The samples for this work were created during the pinscreen trial stay program at La Bande Vidéo.
CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION
Vanishing Point is a 3-channel animation installation centred on the Millennium Trail in Prince Edward County, Ontario. The Millennium Trail is a 48 km linear park and hedgerow accessed by both nature and humans which is under threat by development proposals that would abut the trail and potentially destroy the hedgerow on either side of it, and significantly damage important watersheds like Waring’s Creek.
In a deputation to council, landscape architect Victoria Taylor outlined the importance of this green space and asked for council to "publish design specifications in planning guidelines for road crossings and access points to the Trail that make it safe for users, restrict construction of buildings and fences directly abutting the trail and establish a standard set-back for green space for the entire length of the Millennium Trail, a recommended 6 meters on either side.” The trail is listed as significant in the County’s Official Plan but there are not currently any rules to protect it from encroaching development, so it’s critical that we take action to protect the trail’s natural heritage.
Through this work I will be creating a portrait of the trail over its length and over time, including the year I’ll be making work on it, as well as its past uses and iterations. The work will feature a delicate soundscape and voice-over cut from interviews of trail users and advocates. I’ll be focusing on movement along the trail as movement is an essential part of the trail’s purpose, the Millennium Trail acts as an active transportation corridor for both people and wildlife and was built on a former rail bed.
This project has received funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.
If you have a connection to the Millennium Trail and would like to be involved in the project, please get in touch!
Midheaven is a series of works by Stacey Sproule, in collaboration with artists Ambivalently Yours, Victoria Cheong, Erika DeFreitas, and Sara Keller. Centering on the astrological point of the Midheaven and its dialogue with our public lives, each work explores the sky, weather, air, and atmosphere as reflections of artistic labour. Working in photographic processes and animation, the artists reveal magic in the quotidian, the invisible, and the ubiquitous.
Midheaven show at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre Offsite Location in 2026.
I would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario for their support of this exhibition.
Installation shots by Chris Miner
With the Midheaven as our point of departure, our ongoing collective research unfolded intuitively toward the celestial and atmospheric conditions that shape our co-existence: the air we breathe, the sky and surrounding bodies of water, and the atmosphere. Through correspondence and across our growing exchange, the colour blue emerged as a significant thread weaving connections between science, art history, literature, and personal reflection.
In order to recreate the image of a cloud moving across the sky, we combined rotoscoping, cyanotypes and digital intervention. So rather than taking a picture of the sky, we took a picture in collaboration with the sky, representing the sky. Using camera-less cyanotypes to create a short animated loop, we exposed our mimicry attempts directly to our subject.
Using an animated Corpse Bizarre game to generate hand drawn imagery secret to the other, we explored the essence of mixture. The end result is an investigation into the boundaries of individual style, mark-making and symbology. This atmospheric experiment, translated through the lens of our specific experience, explores the expansive potential and grounding negotiations required of collaboration. As the moving images compete and collide, we are reminded that working in unison does not depend on symmetry or cohesion to simultaneously represent both artists individually and collectively.
Creating the overall sonic atmosphere of the exhibition, this collaboration explores sounds and video loops unsynced with each other. We are interested in the return, the replay, the well-worn groove of repetition and the series of conjunctions and oppositions that the path of each loop makes. The drifting orbit of the work, changing and remixing itself.
Working with minimal imagery, I created a tarot deck that sequences into an animation with each card playing for a tenth of a second. The blue background of each card/frame has created a watery ground for the images to appear and transmogrify on. The Minor Arcana and Court cards play through from Wands to Pentacles, and then each of the Major Arcana are represented by a single hand gesture. I wanted to explore the deck as a temporal whole,experimenting with interpretation and translation in its creation.
A two channel animated work created for the Uncertainty Festival 2025. Rear projected onto the frosted glass door and windows of the office I work in as an arts administrator, this work was a reflection on the entanglement of artistic labour with administrative labour. My own sense of feeling artistic practice trivialized and devalued as valid labour translated into a game that crosses boundaries and entangles its players.
A series of hand-drawn animation studies produced during a fellowship residency at the Vermont Studio Center. These studies are reflections on cycles, loops, transits and the journey of the return.
2024
A series of hand-drawn animation studies produced during a fellowship residency at the Vermont Studio Center. These exploratory studies use a mirror and a window as portals into alternate spaces, and allow the viewer to see the passage of time sped up through the animation process. A behind the scenes test is included below.
2024
A sojourn is a temporary stay; temporariness is contextual and this piece is a reflection on that, our own timescale changes our sense of who or what feels permanent, and in reality all of us are temporary residents here on this planet. This 4 minute animation work is centred on Prince Edward County’s South Shore, a place of significant biodiversity as well as a high density flight path for migratory songbirds, and a popular tourist destination. The conservation of undeveloped lands is crucial to the overall health of this planet and all its inhabitants, and I was drawn to capturing the south shore because I wanted to experience and capture the magic of this wild place.
Development is rapidly transforming Prince Edward County and Ontario at large, ravaging environments and green space in its wake. With the recent greenbelt scandal, the ongoing Ontario Place scandal and the terrible housing scarcity it’s clear that there isn’t a desire to provide humans with affordable housing, there’s just a desire for more greed, in what’s clearly a prevailing colonialist mindset.
Sojourn is a meditation on access to nature, land, and temporary stays. The process involved shooting video footage in the spring and summer of 2024 along the South Shore, rotoscoping that footage and then returning in the fall to shoot the animation frames in motion on the trails at Prince Edward Point, and Monarch Point.
Featured in:
Snow Screening, Cloud Factory ARC, Corner Brook, NFLD
J Spot Window Gallery, Toronto, ON
Les Sommets du cinéma d'animation, Montreal, QC
Third Watch, Saint John, NB
Mirror Mountain Festival, Ottawa, ON
Squeaky Wheel Animation Festival, Buffalo, NY
Particle + Wave Media Arts Festival, Calgary, AB
This project received funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.
2024
Acrylic on Canvas, this work is accompanied by a short text written for Interrupture Zine. See excerpt below:
“I often find myself considering the space inside a prism, one of those cut glass prisms that hang in a window to catch the sun and refract the light into rainbows: transparent panes strung together on an infinite net, a hall of mirrors, a reflection cavern. I have this feeling of its imaginal interior space, like a sieve that the visual world streams through leaving its memory on the glass, imbued. It is hard yet spacious, picturing myself standing in the centre surrounded by kaleidoscopic abstracted light refractions.”
2024
An animation short shot in four outdoor locations. This work is a moving meditation on the elements and nature aiming to highlight the subtle magic present in the natural world as well as the animation process.
2023
Featured in:
West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival (Morgantown, WV)
Uncertainty Festival (Picton)
Broken Film Festival (Guelph)
An in progress installation work of over 400 paintings and two animation works that reflect on the role of ritual in art making. An exploration of repetition, accumulation and devotion as transcendental technologies in the creative process.
Acrylic on paper, various sizes
2023
Acrylic on Paper, 4.5”x6”
Acrylic on Paper, 8”x10.5”
Acrylic on paper, 9.5”x6.5”
Acrylic on paper, 8”x8”
Acrylic on paper, 7.5”x9”
Acrylic on Canvas, 3’x4’
Flowers are agents of the underworld. They emerge from the soil, from the beneath, to unfurl and express their beauty for a short time before they ultimately return to the earth. We cut flowers at the height of their beauty and bring them inside to watch them die, not as torture or an act of morbidity, but as a celebration of life by honouring their ephemerality. We give flowers at major life events and their presence is a comfort to the living when someone has passed. Flowers are a meditation on finiteness, and they give us the chance to reflect on the sometimes hard to comprehend limitedness of life.
“All born to grow and grown to die” - Rex’s Blues, Townes Van Zandt
Watercolour on paper, 18”x24”
2022
Nine card oracle deck made to reflect on the symbolism of moon phases. Produced for the Moonwatchers annual show at Melt Gallery. Accompanied by a guidebook.
watercolour and ink on paper
2021
Drawings exploring repetition and image making as a form of visual meditation.
Gel pen on paper,
2017
24”x36”
30”x48”
Made to be used in my performance “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” at the Rhubarb Festival in 2013. Participants were instructed to pull a card prior to entering a room where they would lie on a table, receive reiki from me and an embroidery tattoo on the clothing they were wearing. It became a meditation on the hands’ ability to transmit, and transform through healing and creative practices.
Embroidery on Cotton,
2013
Inspired by the practices of contemporary theological and contemplative thinkers, this collaborative performative work examined how a spiritual practice gives us the tools we need to function and relate to one another, through concepts like forgiveness, humility, compassion, atonement. This piece explored healing on an inter-personal level and offered a space for strangers to gather, be still, listen, contemplate, converse and reflect.
Featured collaborators: The Toronto Sacred Harp Singing Group, Cory Bertrand, Cameron Buy, Julie Gladstone, Jenna Turk, Deciduous (Vanessa Hansen, Jason Benoit and Stacey Sproule) Alex Samaras (and his group Grex), Dawne Carleton, and Tori Whyte
performance, discussion, and collaboration
2013
