Local artist to collaborate with community for BC Culture Days

Bambi is a French-Canadian artist and graphic designer based in Revelstoke and she’s looking to collaborate with community members for her new exhibit, Behind the wall: the making of a collective mural for BC Culture Days 2020.

The collaborative workshop is meant to get residents to get into art and find it less intimidating.

“Just break the barriers, involve people, it makes it less intimidating when it’s guided as well and after that, they can just take the tools they just learned and bring them home and keep going - that’s the goal,” says Bambi, who is one of five artist ambassadors for this year’s BC Culture Days. 

Bambi is originally from Quebec and moved out to Whistler to live the ‘ski-bum’ lifestyle, but with some winters lacking snow, she decided to get back into art, something she learned from her mother. 

There are different types of artists that will be showcasing their skills this year and each will have to work together. 

“Everyone does one after the other, their workshops so my workshop has to be inspired by the content of the previous workshop,” explains Bambi. 

Her workshop is going to be working on a portable mural that will be showcased at the French Cultural Centre for a few weeks until they find more locations to showcase the work. 

In BC Culture Days, each ambassador gets a mentor. Bambi's is Rob Buchanan, who she’s worked with before. Buchanan inspired the scribble exercise and was an ambassador himself, around three years ago. 

“Being able to see everyone’s process and share our experience, I don’t know you kind of get a window into other artist’s everyday process and I think the process is the coolest thing about art."

The Kelowna workshop will be for two-days, Aug. 28/29 — the first day of the workshop will be brainstorming and working on the background. 

“The next day comes the part where we work a little closer as a team where we do this scribble exercise … that’s pretty fun to do in teams and that way it’s going to be easy to bring everyone’s point of view together.”

Bambi describes her art as fun and cute and hopes to make people happy when they observe her pieces.

The event will be an art workshop with a maximum of six people and is aimed at francophones but everyone is encouraged to sign up for the free 2-day event in Kelowna. She will also be holding a workshop in Revelstoke, that one will only be a one-day event.