Georgia Fullerton’s art tells a deeply personal story of healing, transformation, and self-discovery. Through her art, she has navigated trauma, embraced change, and pursued personal growth. Now, as an expressive arts therapist, Fullerton helps others uncover the transformative potential of creative expression.

In 2010, Fullerton survived intimate partner violence — a pivotal event that profoundly shaped her life and practice. In the aftermath, she turned to abstract art as a means of healing. Through making, she discovered that the act of creating held the power to rebuild, repair, and reconnect her to herself.

What began as a journey of recovery has since evolved into a spiritual exploration. For Fullerton, the creative process is a space where fluid thoughts, emotions, and ideas take tangible form. She explains: “The process of artmaking inspires me and serves as both my spiritual practice and therapy. It allows me to recreate what I think about, experience, and feel.”

This exhibition showcases Fullerton’s abstract expressionist watercolours and collages, offering a glimpse into her creative process. For her, the act of making is as significant as the finished work. Together, they demonstrate how art becomes a vital tool for processing emotion and fostering personal transformation. Fullerton reflects: “Through my art, I hope to inspire others to trust their process, embrace uncertainty, and find their own path to self-discovery, healing, and change.”

Georgia Fullerton is a Jamaican Canadian visual artist, expressive arts therapy practitioner, and arts educator based in Ajax, Ontario. She studied visual arts at Red Deer College and earned a Bachelor of Arts from York University. She is a graduate of the CREATE Institute’s Expressive Arts Therapy program and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Theology in the field of Spiritualities and Community Engagement at Martin Luther University College.”

Organized by The Art Gallery of Mississauga

A member of Curve Lake First Nation and citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation, artist Olivia Whetung draws upon her experience working on and with the land to create artworks that speak of the interdependence and relationality within our ecosystem.

Researching land-based and food de-commodifying movements, Anishinaabe knowledge, and the ecology of her home territory, Whetung has produced a series of sculptural installations, digital prints, and three-dimensional beadworks that articulate the vital connectivity between woodland, wetland, and garden environments. The artist’s first-hand observations are nourished by a critical understanding of Western agricultural models and natural science methodologies as detrimental to the ecologies of Southern Ontario, where they have caused massive environmental destruction. Western worldviews, brought over by European settlers, treat only cleared farmland as “productive” while deeming woodland and wetland unmanageable and useless. These outlooks centre human needs and desires at the expense of the ecosystem’s survival.

Whetung’s poignant works solicit our attention and reconsideration of spaces and species that are crucial to biodiversity and to sustainable food production. Tenderly foregrounding our more-than-human neighbours, they remind us that we are not the only ones to benefit from the land’s gifts, nor to suffer from ecological ruin. The exhibition’s Anishinaabemowin title, inawendiwok, loosely translates as “they are related to each other,” emphasizing the ways in which coexistence within the ecosystem is mutually linked. With human yearning for endlessly available resources and sanitized nature comes devastating loss. Only through a renewed understanding of kinship and gratitude may we restore an ecology based on responsibility and reciprocity that can sustain the future.

Olivia Whetung is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University in 2013, and her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2016. Whetung works in various media including beadwork, printmaking, and digital media. Her work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake.

Mona Filip is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Toronto. Displacement and adaptation are core concerns of her curatorial investigations, informed by personal experiences of immigration and diasporic living. Bringing together a range of perspectives on collective memory, place and belonging, her projects examine the relationship between the personal and the political, ways of rewriting and redressing histories, museum restitution and repair, storytelling as world-building.