A Listening Touch – interactive art, readings, and discussion

Could the use of portable, vibrotactile sculptures aid in connecting us through contemporary issues like medical assistance in dying, the commodification of youth, the apparent disposability of those unable to work, and how we perceive aging and later life?

Join the touring trio of Canadian vibrotactile sculptor Leslie Putnam, novelist Joanna Cockerline, and journalist Kevin Andrew Heslop, together with local poet-philosopher Tara McGowan-Ross, in an afternoon and evening of interactive art, readings, and discussion that delves into questions of whose bodies—and existences—are deemed to matter.

Their 2 p.m. workshop will engage the senses and all ages in narrative feeling, fiction, and non-fiction from the living edge of contemporary Canadian culture-makers.

Their 6 p.m. presentation will feature local memoirist, poet, and philosopher McGowan-Ross in dialogue about how Putnam's vibrotactile art meets our multi-sensory selves where they are; how Cockerline's novel Still intervenes in the Canadian sex-work industry with portraiture; and how Heslop's The Writing on the Wind’s Wall responds with hometown polyphony.

This event is free and open to all! It is co-hosted by ACT Lab and engAGE.

Please register to confirm your attendance (you are welcome to register for one or both parts of the event).

More Information on the Presenters

Joanna Cockerline

Joanna Cockerline’s novel Still is set amid the vibrancy and precarity of unhoused and street-level sex work communities, and follows the story of a woman who lives and works on the streets of Kelowna, BC, who is looking for a fellow sex worker who has gone missing. The novel explores survival, friendship, and what it means to find a home—especially within one’s self. Ultimately, Still is a story of resiliency, community, and hope. The novel is informed by Cockerline’s own experiences as a long-time street outreach volunteer and co-founder of a non-profit street outreach organization.

Kevin Andrew Heslop

A book of hometown talk of euthanasia, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall arranges a disabled media-studies scholar, an ethicist, a widow, a non-profit opponent, a son, a psychiatrist, a medium, two administering doctors, a retiree living with dementia, a Parliamentarian, a death-doula, differing priests, and a hospice-provider around a maple table, beneath a counterbalanced chandelier—and with an urgent invitation: listen here.

Leslie Putnam

Leslie Putnam, whose multidisciplinary work brings an immersive way for people to interact with sculpture on multiple sensory levels, has exhibited in Canada and Europe. Putnam’s art is premised on the idea that sculpture can and should include access through multiple senses while removing the institutional “do not touch” barrier.

Tara McGowan-Ross

Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been featured in print and online, as well as anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, Anthologie de la poesie actuelle des femmes au Québec, Letters from Montreal, and in the forthcoming Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health. She is the author of poetry collections Girth and Scorpion Season, as well as the memoir Nothing Will Be Different, which was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for nonfiction.