About
Candace Couse (she/her) is a Canadian artist living in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia where she is a grateful guest on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō People. She is an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Couse earned an MFA in 2010 and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities in 2020. Her practice has long investigated sickness through autobiographical accounts of illness narratives in visual art. She is interested in what these works do for the artists, viewers and the broader understanding of health towards empathy and justice. Since 2021, she has been working with people and artists living with dementia, exploring collaboration and cross-generational exchange through arts-based methodologies. Couse's creative research is deeply intimate, exposing personal history with her body and illness as well as exploring the fragility of an embodied existence alongside incredible collaborators. This work is conducted under the premise that art practice can tell us something valuable about the social, historical and political ecology and the impact of health and disease.
"Couse’s story is told as the rhizomatic mapping of a woman who is unable to scream or even talk but bleeds the threads that make, and un-make, her body. Writer Ali Smith says, ‘Words will make it less than it is, or something it isn’t.’ Like Couse’s embroidered woman, I’m left speechless."
Australian novelist and poet, Heather Taylor Johnson
for the 2024 Meanjin Quarterly
The Giving and Taking Away of Voice: What art can do / what it can’t, 2024
As a 2012 finalist and prize winner from The Premio Arte Laguna, an international competition organized by the Cultural Association MoCA and Art Laguna, her work was exhibited at the Institute Romeno of Culture and Humanistic Research in Venice, Italy. Other highlights of Couse's professional art practice include: finalist, Kingston Prize, 2013; Artfunkl Residency Prize, Manchester, UK (2013); Iaab residency Prize, Basel, Switzerland (2012); SIM residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2022), Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) 2013 Winner: Special Jury Prize; Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF) Selection (2012); Ottawa International Animation Festival Showcase Selection (2012); She has written and directed a short film with The National Film Board of Canada, titled Sick/Malade, and has shown across Canada, the USA, UK, Switzerland, Italy, Trinidad, Pakistan, Nepal, Iceland and India. Couse has taught in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and France.