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THEY/THEM
Louie Fermor is a professional artist and writer of English-Scottish settler descent residing in Moh'kins'tsis on Treaty 7 territory (Calgary, Canada). Right now, they are working in oil paint and fiction but they have a wide range of mediums.
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Via themes of history, naturalism, queerness, and disability, they explore portraiture and storytelling, including both the stories we've committed to the pages and the stories we tell ourselves.
ARTWORK
Fermor has shown work in venues and publications in Toronto, New York, Montreal, St. John's, and Moh'kins'tsis. They have won multiple awards and have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Calgary Arts Development. As a visual artist, they have been in residence with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, NYU, and Artscape Gibraltar, and attended programs with Sync Disabled Arts Leadership and the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, among others.
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ARTS WRITING
Fermor has published criticism and essays with Momus, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. They were the runner-up for the 2019 Canadian Art Writing Prize and winner of the 2018 Luma Quarterly and M:ST Critical Writing Prize. From 2019-20 they ran the self-published digital art publication Studio. Fermor is also an early career fiction writer, working on their first fiction novel titled The Devil Finally Gets His Rest.
COMMUNITY WORK / ACTIVISM
All of Fermor's creative pursuits are linked to communitarianism, awareness-raising, or collective growth. They are a critic and advocate, and believe that creatives have historically been on the leading edge of civic movements for a reason. Fermor understands art and writing as a stepping stone for transformative connection.
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Some of the organizations and grassroots groups that Fermor has volunteered with, collaborated with and advised for include the Artist as Changemaker program, the Feminist Art Collective, Pansy Club, and Disability Without Poverty. They regularly attend marches, rallies and community events in Moh'kins'tsis and engage in arts activism. Louie strongly believes in using their skills and voice to amplify the advocacy of others.
ART AS RESEARCH / TRANSDISCIPLINARY METAPHOR
Louie creates metaphors to explain and illustrate complex ideas, and then presents them to a public. They deliver those metaphors through writing, storytelling, and visual art.
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Analogy = 'the heart is a pump'
Metaphor = 'the heart is an elephant'
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Analogies describe one thing as something else in order to explain its function. Metaphors intentionally abstract something in order to explain the context surrounding that thing.
While describing a heart as a pump can help us understand the vascular system, describing the heart as an elephant will help us understand how the heart is also a symbol for human relationships, and those can have the characteristics of an elephant: loyalty, a long memory, or disastrous consequences when one is made angry. We now consider not just the organ of the heart but also how we use the heart as a symbol in our culture. We consider other animals, cause and effect, the inner experience of emotion, and other contextual elements from across different disciplines and subjects.
Now imagine a book about an elephant losing its baby to a poacher. Imagine a painting of the elephant returning home without it's baby. Those would have more cultural nuances than only an analogy of the heart as a pump.
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​Themes that Louie is working in right now:
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biodiversity as a metaphor for neurodiversity
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the changing sky and seasons as a metaphor for trans experience
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mycelial and mycorrhizal networks as a metaphor for sustaining disabled arts advocacy
