A local high school student was put in the national arts spotlight this past week by the prestigious Historica Canada organization, a federal charitable agency that promotes Canadian culture, arts and national identity.
Historica issued a challenge for intermediate high school students to explore issues of immigration, identity and racism through writing and art.
Katherine Fullerton was one of 400 who responded to the Passages Canada Write And Make Art! Challenge and her submission of a charcoal image entitled Break Down the Walls was chosen as the winning entry. She explained that the obscured faces peeping through a gap in a stone barrier caught in her mind because "that's exactly how racism is: it puts you on the other side of society."
The Grade 12 student at Cedars Christian School said she was surprised to win, since the contest was national in scope, but gave her a burst of affirmation about her artistic skills. She doesn't prolifically work at art, since she has to balance her studies, but when she starts a piece she works hard on it - so much so it is difficult to reach completion unless there is a deadline attached like an art class due date. Break Down the Walls was an extension of a school art project.
"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, but then I saw the contest and that sparked it," she said. "It didn't change the outcome I had in mind for the image, but it definitely changed the purpose. I drew with a different intention. It added motivation."
It was something that fired her passions, so that guided her fingers gripping the charcoal.
"Racism is definitely one of the things that gets under my skin," she said. "Not many things do. But treating someone differently just because of the colour of their skin or where they are from - that just bothers me. It's such a good issue to put my art towards."
Only a few months before she put her talents towards something far more frivolous and she won that, too. She and friend Shannon Kragt, a budding filmmaker, created a do-it-yourself music video of themselves singing the Adam Lambert song No Trespassing for a contest Lambert held.
"He sent us a plastic plaque that had No Trespassing on it, and he signed it to us," Fullerton said with a giggle. It was a total lark for the two of them and another big surprise that they won. "We were just trying out filmmaking, and we had a lot of fun. It took us about 30 hours of work. Shannon is very talented so I'm glad there was that reward."
An avid hockey fan, Fullerton also won a signed team jersey from her beloved Vancouver Canucks for a Twitter challenge in aid of the Canucks For Kids fund. She also won a mini-laptop via a Twitter contest in which she predicted perfectly that goalie Corey Schneider would make 21 saves in periods one and two of a game versus the Minnesota Wild.
Hockey was the subject of her final high school art project as well.
"I just finished a canvas painting of the 1980 USA Miracle On Ice hockey game - when the States beat the powerful Russians at the Lake Placid Olympics," she said. "My art teacher said we had to do our project on any historical event, and we were also learning about the Cold War at the same time in a different class, and I'm just a huge hockey fan, so these thoughts all just kind of centred on that moment."
These ways of telling stories and contextualizing human events is what the Historica Canada officials were trying to tap into when they called on the artistic talents of youth.
"Through this work, we see a new generation of Canadian artists and storytellers defining crucial questions of citizenship and identity," said Anthony Wilson-Smith, president of Historica Canada. "The results are impressive not only in creative terms, but in broadening the discussion of how we as Canadians define ourselves."
Fullerton is letting her own context simmer for a short while. She is now finished high school, she is working on no other personal art project, and she has not decided on a post-secondary course of action yet. She knows the next steps in her life can be big ones, but as she ponders her future she is trying not to look at things as just black and white.
