Harp, Oh Canada

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Alicia Proudfoot – Alberta

harpist . artist

aliciaproudfoot.com

Summer. When I reflect on my harp playing, I associate the wash of intense eccentricity and the simultaneous lingering stillness in performance with the hot afternoon pushing into night of Canadian Summers. – Alicia

Alicia Proudfoot is an interdisciplinary artist with a penchant to incorporate industrial process and technology into her projects. She delights in modifying her formal training in sculpture, harp, and performance to engage people. Experimentation is valuable to her creative research about humour’s role as explored through her somatic archive on illness. The body is the thematic root of Alicia’s art practice. A sick body, in her case an asthmatic body, creates friction with society’s mandates of idealized productivity, strength, and sustainable health. She critiques these rigid qualifications through sensational design and reinterprets her body and harp as entertainment that demands attention and re-evaluation on how society conflates illness with identity. Alicia received a BFA from the University of Alberta in 2016 and graduated with an MFA from NSCAD University in 2019. She continues to explore sound and sculpture together with a recent residency at the Banff Centre and has performed with O.N.C.E. an improvisational collective in Edmonton.

Baah1 by Alcia Proudfoot

ARTIST STATEMENT
Walk Tall is my absurd approach to sculpture and harp as I augment my asthmatic body in performance. This multifaceted ongoing work playfully explores my experience with chronic illness and nose dives into macabre representation as I extend my body into music and sculptural installation. There is a thingness to my actions. I am enamored with the “vital materiality”, described by political theorist Jane Bennet, that surges under the skin of human and non-human. To channel this energy, I have reinterpreted my body as many entertaining things like a three-part musical Ode for my medical inhalers; prosthetic legs for my harp; metal party decorations and a breath concert. As things, they have power to establish a sense of joy towards the necessary labour for self-care.

There are several intersections in my research satisfied through this ludic behaviour. From my knowledge and experimentation of a harp’s resonance; the commodification of my asthma to archive my story; and on to the fierce dreaming of Disability Arts that demands sustainability for the time spent by any body as it exerts itself and rests.


Earlier in 2024 I delved into the modification of my harp as a visiting academic at the University of Alberta while in residence with the fine arts department and the sound studies institute. I carved a pair of rocking legs out of laminated plywood and performed on an ornate oval table in the Senate Chamber on Campus. It was an amazing experience that has invigorated me to make more elaborate legs using my vast material experience as an interdisciplinary artist.

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts supported my further research in developing 5 more sets of legs:

  • The Pipping Bag Legs are cast plastic cones with pipped silicone star dots.
  • The Loach Legs are small wood carvings that capture the elongated allure of loach fish.
  • The Buoy Legs are an amalgam of repurposed plastic swimming pool reel and plumbing parts.
  • The Hydroformed Legs are pieces of metal expanded with pressurized water and cut into loops.
  • The Chimera Legs combine marble with salvaged instrument parts (ebony piano keys and a harp pillar and shoulder).

It was immediate how my harp transformed when wearing these different legs and I was delighted to host a backyard performance at my studio to display the altered sound and performance of each pair.

Connection to Canada
I value my stewarding relationship with Canada and intend to involve/consider the community in my work as I give back to a place that helped me flourish as an artist. Amiskwacîwâskahikan continues to be the place I live and create in. I have relished in the recent endeavour of building a studio that supports my artistic career and it is edifying to have opportunities where I share the space with collaborators and peers. My roots are here, in my family history, my education and what I contribute to uphold a safe and welcoming neighbourhood. I am the 4th generation of my family to live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Since 1906, the Proudfoots have lingered in Western Canada coming from P.E.I., meriting a humble sense of community and justice through occupations as teachers, a detective, engineers, and farmers. It was an honour to travel that similar distance to return to Halifax for my Masters degree with my harp in tow. I grew up in the industrial sector of Edmonton by the 50th Street CP Rail change yard, a heterotopia of transitory movement and sound that has shaped my relationship to place and how I appreciate rhythmic motion in music. I have found wonderful friends through Harp music in Canada with different performances/ residencies. Even with Harp workshops like at the Island Mountain Arts Harp School I find community in the intimate places like Wells, BC, where harpists gather from across the country.

Harp Study
I Studied Harp under Terry McDade for 10 years and have continued to stay curious as I explore the possibilities with the instrument. I have done Harp workshops with IMA as well as having impromptu conversation and studio visits with other Harpists in my community creating shared learning experiences.

Harp Career/ Performing and Teaching
My Harp Career is interwoven with my visual art practice, playing in gallery exhibitions, creating fascinating collaborations with sound sculpture, and relishing uncommon instrumental combinations. I was recently a Visiting Academic for the University of Alberta’s Department of Art and Design. While there I gave guest lectures to the sculpture students as well as to the Elementary Education department about cross curriculum study with music and art. I was also invited to critique for soundscape student projects, and made an exhibition with the Sound Studies Institute of my creative research while there. I have performed while in residence at the Banff Centre, and adored the amazing resonance of their Silo building. Other performances have been with Local organizations like the Kaliedo festival, the Works, and New Music Edmonton where I could embrace creative shenanigans with couch harps and a series of sculptural legs, elevating my instrument like a preening creature. Recently, I have been performing Operations in Non-Permanent Collective Extemporization (O.N.C.E), which celebrates the ad hoc community of improvising by game-ifying the experience to create sound and rhythms together.