In Walking Alongside Trauma, 12 material artists address the ripple effect of sexualized violence
Craft Council of BC exhibition centres vicarious trauma in response to the iMPACTS research project at McGill University
Debra Sloan’s A Trio of Walkers. Photo by Alex Montes
Craft Council of BC presents Walking Alongside Trauma at the Amelia Douglas Gallery at Douglas College’s New Westminster campus to February 28
IN 1990, AMERICAN clinical psychologists Irene Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman developed the term “vicarious trauma” after conducting research into the minds of therapists who were working with trauma survivors. They found that professionals may experience a disruptive change to their own psychological state, worldview, or identity as a result of engaging empathetically with trauma survivors.
Vicarious trauma can affect people working in several different career fields, including therapists, paramedics, police officers, social workers, researchers, and journalists. It’s a phenomenon that the Craft Council of BC is bringing attention to in Walking Alongside Trauma, a new exhibition curated by its executive director Raine McKay that is now on display at the Amelia Douglas Gallery.
Featuring the works of 12 B.C.-based multimedia artists, Walking Alongside Trauma sheds light on the ripple effect of sexualized violence and how it can impact several facets of society. The exhibition is part of the long-term iMPACTS research project led by professor Shaheen Shariff at McGill University, which addresses sexualized violence on university campuses with the goal of dismantling and preventing it.
“The material arts, in my mind, are a very effective responder to an emotional subject, because we’re so familiar with materials,” says ceramic aritst Debra Sloan, who created pieces for the project. “We wear materials, we use materials. They have a distinct connection to us.”
Each of the artists who participated in Walking Alongside Trauma spoke to a different witness who has experienced vicarious trauma, and then translated what they were told into two distinct works. The witnesses consulted span healthcare providers, counsellors, legal professionals, and more. The resulting pieces on display range from embroidery, fabric-collage, and textile creations to sculptures made of glass, clay, and recycled industrial waste.
Sloan, who has three of her ceramic works featured at the Amelia Douglas Gallery, has been involved with the exhibition since its inception. From 1991 to 2013, she led a clay-sculpture course at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts; it just so happened that Shariff—who studies the intersection of law, education, and social media—was one of her first students, and the two maintained a friendship over the years. When Shariff asked if Sloan would provide an artistic response to the iMPACTS project, the ceramicist agreed, but felt it made sense to involve a wider community of craft and material artists beyond just herself.
Sloan’s witness for Walking Alongside Trauma was a mental-health clinician working towards her master’s of counselling degree with a focus on resilience and how to work through bureaucracy. She serves several compromised communities across Vancouver, including trafficked youth.
“Everyone had to sign agreements about disclosure,” the artist notes. “We had to make sure there were no specifics, no names, no dates. Everything was at a different level of information. It was about two things: how the witnesses themselves had encountered their clients or patients and how it affected them, and then how they felt the ripple effect of the secondary trauma would affect their families, their communities.”
Debra Sloan, Connection / Contagion. Photo by Alex Montes
After hearing what her witness had to say, Sloan crafted three works that engage with the concepts of resilience, recovery, and contagion. The artist often bases her practice around the female figure; here, though, the sculptures are a bit more ambiguous. “I call them proto-humans,” Sloan says. “They’re sort of desexualized.”
A theme throughout her pieces is the use of grids to imply barriers. A Trio of Walkers features three figures, each 30 inches tall and 20 inches wide, whose nude bodies have been painted with different grid patterns, making them appear caged inside themselves. Their hair is made from metal nails; their expressions are distraught.
In Connection / Contagion, three figures are lying down, their bodies made from woven-lattice ceramics; colourful strands of telephone wire bind them together, a symbol of connection and communication. Sloan was inspired by her witness finding community with other social workers; they were able to better support one another through their interactions, but it also meant they were sharing the burden of each other’s vicarious trauma.
Her third sculpture, A Gulliver Moment, features a lone figure with telephone-wire hair, constrained by a net of woven wire. It’s a reference to the book Gulliver’s Travels, in which a giant Gulliver is tied down by the tiny people of Lilliput when he’s perceived as a threat.
“Several witnesses pointed out that their greatest problem was dealing with the barriers that are innately in any bureaucracy,” Sloan says. “Every bureaucracy has to protect itself, and those barriers can impede assisting those in need. For instance, during COVID, my witness was working in a halfway home that had six people, and she was told that she had to tell them they had to leave and go back out on the street. She had a couple of colleagues with her, and for one night, they did it—and then they said, ‘We can’t do this, you know, we can’t throw these children out on the street.’ And these were juveniles. So they brought them back in. And I think everything was overlooked because it was COVID and nothing was stable, right?
“So when it came to my own work,” Sloan continues, “it was the barriers and the connectivity that I thought about. How trauma connects people, harms people—it does both. Everything is two ways. She [my witness] talked about resilience, for instance. She talked about how you learn to cope when you have to bring home what you’ve experienced. And she talked about learning how to not just look after yourself, but sort of put it [trauma] separately from yourself, and how to carry on and not lose hope.”
Sarah Montroy, Vulnerability. Photo by Alex Montes
Acknowledging that sexualized violence negatively impacts communities at large, rather than alienating survivors, can help drive people towards collective caring and meaningful change. It’s a concept emphasized by the works of the other artists featured in Walking Alongside Trauma: Bridget Catchpole, Benjamin Kikkert, Nevada Lynn, Rachael Ashe, Deborah Dumka, Hope Forstenzer, Amy Gogarty, Bettina Matzkuhn, Sarah Montroy, Eleanor Hannan, and Louise Perrone.
One of textile artist Dumka’s featured pieces is a ruby-red flat felt figure called Power Stance. In her artist statement, she says it “honours the work my witness undertakes to strengthen herself for her work with survivors of sexual violence. Red is a colour she associates with power and feeling in control”.
Paper artist Ashe’s Emotional Labour: rage, sorrow, resentment, frustration, and heartbreak features a silhouette of her own witness, fists raised in frustration as she battles a swirl of intricately cut blue paper that represents her own sorrow. Glass artist Forstenzer’s Hard To Hold is a bright-yellow bowl full of copper-foiled glass flames, with the outline of her witness’s hand adorned on the side.
Elsewhere, multidisciplinary artist Montroy’s Vulnerability sees three ceramic walls connected by red thread, which she shares in her artist statement represents “the setting-up of protective layers, and the choosing of when to reveal the soft and vulnerable inside layer”.
Rachael Ashe, Emotional Labour: rage, sorrow, resentment, frustration, and heartbreak. Photo by Alex Montes
Deborah Dumka, Power Stance. Photo by Alex Montes
There are plenty more works here to witness. And after Walking Alongside Trauma wraps up in Vancouver, it will tour to Montreal in March, where it will be on display at McGill University as part of the iMPACTS project.
At the Amelia Douglas Gallery, professors Lisa Smith and Jaime Yard are inviting students to visit the exhibition and create zines inspired by what they’ve witnessed; they will then compile the zines into a collective audience response. Throughout the duration of Walking Alongside Trauma, there will also be on-call therapeutic support provided by Douglas College counsellors in case any attendees find the subject matter at hand distressing.
Ultimately, the intent behind Walking Alongside Trauma is to generate empathy by guiding viewers through the experiences of their community members, and offering education about the reality of sexualized violence.
“The point of art is to create and provoke a response…it is supposed to be about awakening people’s understanding of how deep a problem this is, you know?” Sloan says. “It isn’t just one person suffering—it’s everyone. It affects your whole community.” 
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