free online mentorship program for
three emerging, remotely located artists
with artist-mentor, genevieve robertson
deadline to apply
April 29, 2026 * 12 AM Midnight PDT
Hedge-rider is a Mentorship program hosted by Oxygen Art Centre for emerging, remotely located artists with Genevieve Robertson.
Please complete the google form to express interest in participating.
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Hedge-rider is a free, online mentorship program designed to support emerging, remotely located contemporary artists. Presented by Oxygen Art Centre, it is open to artists working in all mediums across visual and interdisciplinary practices who live and work in remote, rural contexts across British Columbia.
Mentees will be paired with Nelson-based artist Genevieve Robertson. Meetings will take place online via Zoom. Meetings will be structured according to the mentee’s needs and specific directions.
🌱 This program supports three artists over three one-hour meetings in total.
The artist-mentor, Genevieve Robertson, will support artists in the areas of professional development, studio work, and writing. Robertson is specifically interested in the responsibilities, gifts and challenges of living outside an urban centre as an artist, and how place informs practice and profession.
In the spirit of liminality, the program is entitled “hedge-rider” to connect with the etymology of the hag, a woman or practitioner who lives in two realms simultaneously.
The hedge-rider’s artist-mentor, Genevieve Robertson, is interested in the idea of someone who occupies two places or realms at once, whether this is the hedge-rider who lives on the periphery of a town, an artist who bridges rural and urban contexts, or someone who has access to and knowledge of more-than-human spaces–bringing experience across one to the other. Information gained from hedge-rider journeys is used for healing, finding lost items, or gaining wisdom, which this program seeks to situate within artistic exchange.
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🌱 Deadline to Apply: April 29, 2026 by 12 AM Midnight PDT
Interested artists must:
- Live and work in a remote, rural community within British Columbia
- Be an “early-career” or “emerging” artist in its widest definition
- Have access to a device and WiFi connection during the project duration
- Be available for three hour-long daytime sessions, between 10:00am – 2:00pm from June 1, 2026, to July 16, 2026
Applications will be reviewed according to an equity-lens. Three artists will be chosen to participate in the mentorship program. Selected artists will be notified by May 8, 2026. Only artists moving into the selection process will be contacted.
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About Your Artist-Mentor:
Genevieve Robertson works at the intersection of visual art and environmental studies. Her practice is grounded in drawing/painting, and extends to video, installation, and various forms of collective work and collaboration. Studio and fieldwork are of equal importance: she often focuses on ecosystems such as watersheds, old growth forests, wildfire sites and marine shorelines as a means of engaging in intuitive, materially driven and place-informed practice. Through this work she explores the origins of primordial matter across geologic time, industrial and settler-colonial impacts on more-than-human beings, and the intelligence and interconnection of the life systems of which we are part.
Genevieve is informed by a personal and intergenerational history of forestry labour in remote forestry camps all over British Columbia. She is of mixed European settler ancestry and currently lives and works on the unceded territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx Sinixt Confederacy Arrow Lakes and Yaqan Nukiy Lower Kootenay Band peoples with her artist partner and twin toddlers.
Robertson holds a BFA from NSCAD University (Halifax) and an MFA from Emily Carr University (Vancouver). She has been supported through exhibitions, symposia, and residencies internationally, most recently at the Orange County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Oceanside Museum of Art (Los Angeles), SBC Gallery (Montréal), The Works on Water Triennial (New York), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Oregon), the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Access Gallery (Vancouver), the Burnaby Art Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, and Grand Forks Art Gallery. Her work has been published with the Centre for Alterity Studies (UK), The Capilano Review (BC), The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (ON), The Dark Mountain Project (UK) and Fire Season (BC). It is also featured in Outdoor School (Douglas and McIntyre), Art and Climate Change (Thames and Hudson), and upcoming Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada (Wilfrid-Laurier University Press).
She is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance for their generous support, and to all the individuals, organizations and institutions that have made her work possible.