Nan Yeomans Grant For Artistic Development
2023 Recipient: Kelsey Dawn Pearson
Kelsey Dawn Pearson is an artist residing in Katarokwi/Kingston. They recently graduated from Concordia University with an MFA in Print Media and hold a BFA from NSCAD. Pearson is a multidisciplinary artist using print, natural fibres and puppetry/performance as their main media. Pearson’s work explores themes of gender and body dysmorphia in relation to bodily connection to land.
Their work is supernatural, chaotic and colourful swampwater.
They explore themes of distorted reality, confront personal ethics, battle dysphoria, bridge fiction and the present through the use of portals, touch, feel and play…
In a world bordering ours.
About the Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development
The Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development aims to help young visual artists and/or artisans further their artistic growth and education. It awards one annual grant of $2,500 to an emerging artist between 17 and 40 years old, who may be practicing in any visual medium including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, pottery, fabric, glass, metal, film and/or video. All applicants must have an address in the Kingston area, which includes the City as well as the Townships of Loyalist, South Frontenac, Central Frontenac, North Frontenac, and Frontenac Islands. The grant is intended for training or focused creation that will contribute to the artist’s development and career.
Applications are assessed by a jury of peers based on eligibility, financial need, and artistic merit. The grant is made possible through an endowment fund administered by the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area.
Deadline
We are not currently accepting applications to this program. Applications for the 2024 Nan Yeomans Grant will open in the fall. 2023 documents remain available below for reference.
Important Documents
About Nan Yeomans
Nan Yeomans was a prominent Kingston artist dedicated to supporting local and emerging artists in the visual arts. In her late twenties, she enjoyed three summers at Queen’s University Summer School of Fine Arts, and subsequently, she lived most of her adult life in Kingston. From then and for the rest of her 82 years she stayed busy with her art and her other responsibilities, but always found time to contribute to the community. She died in 2004, leaving all of her art and almost all of her estate to the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area.
It was Nan’s wish to fund a grant for promising young artists and artisans developing their talents in the greater Kingston area. The Nan Yeomans Fund, established at the Community Foundation for Kingston & Area with her bequest, now provides for an annual award in her name that is administered by the Kingston Arts Council.
Past Recipients
Kelsey McNulty
2022 Recipient
Kelsey is a Canadian collage artist and animator. Her art is influenced by her career as a travelling musician and a desire to construct new worlds and see things from new perspectives. She draws inspiration from Eduardo Paolozzi’s screen-printed collages and his suggestion on the way images influence our reality. With a focus online and colour, she creates vivid scenes and landscapes and attempts to balance humour and introspection in her work.
Natasha Jabre
2021 Recipient
Natasha Jabre is a Kingston-based teacher and artist whose most recent painting series fills scenes of children and toys with colourful light. Her work, which includes drawings, paintings, and sculptures, has been exhibited locally and internationally.
Tonya Corkey
2020 Recipient
Tonya will use the Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development to attend a table loom class and a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre, where she will research and create a new series of sculptural works.
GHY Cheung
2019 Recipient
The Nan Yeomans Grant supported GHY Cheung's project in Hong Kong — a love letter in the form of several interventions that take their cue from "Friendship as a Way of Life." This series is part of a larger exploration of intimacies formed in displacement (temporary travel, permanent migration) and relationships sustained over long distances as potential sites of queer world-making.
Ella Gonzales
2018 Recipient
The Nan Yeomans Grant supported Ella to expand her artistic practice across mediums, including painting, video and installation. Upcoming projects will explore themes of inhabited space(s), migration, temporalities and cultural identity.
Jennifer Demitor
2017 Recipient
Jennifer's work uses the built environment to adjust our perceptions of the natural world and connect us to our surroundings. As the recipient of the 2017 Nan Yeomans Grant for Artistic Development, Jennifer began a series exploring prevalent themes in her practice within the context of a new more permanent medium.
