Gallery in The Woods: Traditions and Tributaries
Experience Gallery in the Woods, August 8–15 at 10 AM, celebrating traditions, creativity, and community in Windermere.
This year’s exhibition theme, Traditions and Tributaries, reflects the way individual creative acts flow together to shape a shared cultural landscape. Like tributaries feeding a larger body of water, each artist, performance, and creative gathering contributes to the vibrant cultural life of Windermere Village.
This exhibition honours the traditions carried by elders and ancestors, acknowledging the histories that ground us while celebrating the evolving community that continues to grow along these shores. Rooted in place, memory, and the natural environment, the works invite viewers to reflect on connection, creativity, and the ways art nourishes and sustains community.
Visit the Gallery in the Woods to experience beautiful works from featured artists throughout the festival week:
- Gayle Dempsey
- Lisa Skelding
- Bonnie Newell
- Audrey Mah
- Sue Hindle
- Greg Hindle
- Natalia Laluq
Gayle Dempsey
I travel in wandering thought and wandering steps—along winding creeks, mossy banks, and the quiet edges of wetlands and beaver ponds. These overlooked landscapes draw me into a space of reflection, where the beaver emerges as both muse and guide. More than a national emblem, the beaver is a creature of instinct and intention—a quiet architect, builder of shelter, guardian of water, and bearer of a vision grounded in care and sustainability.
Their lodges and dams, tucked away in the far corners of the Canadian landscape, are not grand gestures but enduring ones—shelters shaped by resilience and deep harmony with the land and water. Together, they trace a hidden cartography across the country, a soft infrastructure of survival and stewardship.
Through layered compositions and imagined terrains, my work invites the viewer to see the familiar with new eyes—to witness the subtle industry of beavers as a profound form of community building and ecological collaboration. The beaver’s world is not loud or monumental, but purposeful and continuous. In their presence, we are reminded that the most lasting transformations often begin quietly, shaped by instinct, care, and time. My works honour the interconnectedness of land, water, and community, reflecting my belief that creativity is both a personal mediation and a shared cultural inheritance.
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Lisa Skelding
Drawing inspiration from the lakes, forests, and changing ecosystems of Ontario, my work explores the parallels between human resilience and the resilience of the natural world. Through layered colour, texture, and mixed-media processes, I invite viewers to reflect on memory, place, ecological change, and the interconnected relationships that sustain both people and the environments they call home.
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Bonnie Newell
As a young child, I was awakened to nature when spending summers by the lake. The traditions shared at the family cottage are cherished memories I hold close to my heart. Exploring the world of trees, flowers and water, I developed an impressionistic and abstract style of painting. With these works, I play with composition and brush strokes to provide an essence of flow & calm. As an artist with an abstract view of the world, this has brought me to a deeper connection to the creator, a conscious awareness of traditional techniques for holistic energy healing and a passion for making the world a better place.
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Audrey Mah
My work is rooted in an ongoing exploration of Chinese and Mexican ceramic traditions, drawing inspiration from their shared appreciation of balance, simplicity, geometry, and the cultural significance of functional objects. These cross-cultural influences have become central to my practice and continue to shape both form and surface. The vases in this exhibit are made from porcelain, while the marble jar is a combination of two stoneware clay bodies. Some of my work evolved intuitively, with smooth flowing lines guided by touch, while others are wheel-thrown or assembled from thrown components. Each piece is finished with terra sigillata or glaze, depending on the surface quality, tone, and tactile experience I wish to achieve. Through years of refining these techniques, I have developed a visual language that combines skilled craftsmanship with materials used in creative and expressive ways. My work honours traditional ceramic practices while giving them a modern perspective. It invites the viewers to think about how cultural history continues to shape the objects we use every day.
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Susan Hindle
An Enduring Legacy: The vintage armchair is more than a seat—it is an inheritance. It cradles both woman and child, suggesting that love is never held by one person alone. Every embrace rests within the embrace of memory, tradition, and those who came before. Like tributaries joining a river, generations flow together, carried by a legacy that is both enduring and quietly alive. My landscapes create spaces for quiet contemplation, inviting reflection, renewal, and connection with self and loved ones.
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Greg Hindle
My artwork explores our relationship with nature, drawing inspiration from the power, peace, and beauty of the natural world—and how we interact with it. It invites reflection on the significance of our environment, encouraging dialogue about how we care for and preserve it, and its influence on our physical and social well-being.
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Natalia Laluq
Working on a plein-air series is my way to lean Nature on scene. It is my tribute to the classical genre of paintings, well established in Canada since the Group of Seven. Going outside to paint has a lot of challenges, but outcomes with a very bright “in the moment” result of fresh, snapshot-like, reportage pieces. They reflect the weather conditions, my own mood and the abilities of that very day I went out to paint. Presented is a series of oils on canvas made during my visit to Windermere and the surrounding areas in 2025.
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