Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 6:00pm
Register here
Free to attend
Artist-in-residence Daniel Barrow hosts a paper doll poem workshop on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 6:00pm. This workshop is free to attend; however, registration is required and spaces limited.
Participants will work with paper collaging techniques developed by the artist through their “paper doll poems” practice, which combines Barrow’s interests in the traditions of folk poetry and limericks, butterfly collections, emoji chains and pictographic languages.
Barrow’s collaged pictographic poems have evolved over the past two years to explore symmetry in palindromic language, incorporating many precepts of floriography––the cryptological system of communication through the exchange of bouquets of flowers. The artist is particularly interested in the floriography which flourished in the 19th-century, when floral arrangements permitted the sender to express feelings which were forbidden to be spoken aloud in Victorian society.
Participants can expect to spend time with the artist making and learning techniques together in collage and composition.
Learn more about Daniel Barrow’s “Paper Doll Poems” series here.
To attend, please complete the online registration form here.
This workshop is scheduled during the Three Way Mirror residency with artists Daniel Barrow, Glenn Gear, and Paige Gratland at Oxygen Art Centre from July 3, 2026, to August 7, 2026.
The overarching residency considers how traditional crafts can convey queer stories and community, and how queer signifiers and strategies can express intersectional identities through conceptual craft-based practices. For each artist this has been a natural progression, resulting in the production of woven queer colourways (Gratland), glitter-bombs sealskins (Gear) and paper-doll poems (Barrow).
This workshop is free to attend and limited to six participants.
All materials and tools will be provided.
Registration is required to attend.
Daniel Barrow is a genderfluid, Tiohtià:ke / Montreal-based storyteller/artist/filmmaker who has employed parallel strategies in their approach to the tradition of paper dolls – inventing “narrative architectures” and “paper doll poems” that grapple with the dollhouse/paper doll.
images: (above) Daniel Barrow, “Paper doll poem,” Hand-dyed and cut paper dolls pinned to screen-printed matboard, 102 x 81 cm; Courtesy the Artist; (middle) Daniel Barrow, “Paper doll poem,” detail, Hand-dyed and cut paper dolls pinned to screen-printed matboard, 102 x 81 cm; Courtesy the Artist; (below) Daniel Barrow, Courtesy the Artist