In this episode, we interview amazing artist and mother, Julia Hutt. Julia Hutt is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist residing in Kjipuktuk. Inspired by her own experience with pregnancy, birthing and baby-raising, Julia works with both traditional and digital illustration to create anecdotal scenes that portray snapshots of early parenthood. Her work challenges the capitalist devaluation of child rearing and traditionally gendered work. She produces work with Wellness Within and Martha Paynter to raise awareness about reproductive justice in the Canadian prison system.

In this episode, artists Claire Drummond, Megan Hosmer and Rena Thomas introduce themselves to listeners.The M(other) Artist Podcast is a collaboration between Megan Hosmer, Claire Drummond and Rena Thomas. In this podcast, we interview local artists who are also primary caregivers about their experiences navigating parenting and the art world. We discuss the ways in which their art practices have been impacted by parenthood, navigating how care work can be both an exceedingly disruptive force as well as a profound emotional experience that can expand our conceptions of art-making, interdependency and existence.Claire Drummond is a painter, filmmaker and MFA Candidate at NSCAD University. She uses self-portraits and portraits of others to navigate the inter-relationality between artist and subject. Her works feature gestural passages of oil paint, rendering the painter’s embodied presence felt in depictions of self and other through distinctive line and brush work. Her paintings are held in national and international private collections, and her work has been featured in print publications such as Visual Arts News.Megan Hosmer is an artist, teacher, and 2023 graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s MFA program. She has exhibited locally and internationally. Her work was selected for Motherhood Unveiled, an international juried exhibition at Stitches and Pics Gallery in Sackets Harbor, New York. Megan’s work has also been featured in various print publications, most recently in Visual Arts News. She moved to Nova Scotia from Oklahoma in 2021.Rena Thomas is an artist and experimental filmmaker, as well as an MFA Candidate at NSCAD University. She is interested in the concept of her body as her home, and imagines her physical body as the vessel that carries her through this life, holding the marks of past experiences and traumas. More recently, she has been interested in themes of memory, loss and interdependency as they relate to her Italian matrilineal heritage and analogue image-making.