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Dawn Matheson

Interdisciplinary artist (Canada)

Flairs

Award winner
Online Jury 2025
SWS23 shortlisted
Dawn’s art is about relationships. She is a Canada-based multimedia artist with a socially-engaged practice, specializing in video and audio art, installed, broadcast and performed in public spaces.
Her work can be found at festivals, galleries, museums; in national publications and on broadcast stations; but lives best in forests, train stations, fountains, barns and alleyways in your neighbourhood.
Through inclusive artistic practices, Dawn seeks to interrupt civic and social spaces with unexpected moments of beauty, curiosity and joy.
Her relational interventions hope to offer liberation from everyday suffering and to dismantle barriers between individuals by creating alternative stories that build compassion and kinship.
*Her most recent work, How To Draw a Forest (Trees, Mental Health and Creativity), will result in immersive participatory Audio Walks that wind through an Arboretum in Guelph, Canada, guided by a team of youth with lived experience of mental illness.* www.howtodrawatree.ca
You can find out more about her work at thiswasnow.com
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pedestrian acts

By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.

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