Meet MAKESHIFT's core volunteer organizing team!  
Alison Bigg is a contemporary artist practicing in Victoria, BC.  Working in a broad range of media including soap, wax, found objects, painting and printmaking she creates sculptures that engage senses of sight, scent, sound and light.  Her sculptures negotiate a tension between splendor and spectacle by confronting the viewer with subject matter that elicits disparate sensations of wonderment and discomfort.    

Alison graduated from Emily Carr College of Art in 1989. In 2017 she finished an Independent Studies program at Vancouver Island School of Art. Alison was awarded a People and Places grant for a large project by the City of Victoria (2012) and has had several solo shows in B.C. She currently has a studio space and is a board member at arc.hive Artist Run Centre.

​Jessie Demers holds a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax and a B.Ed from UBC. She is passionate about cultivating creative communities, and has over 12 years experience working in the visual arts, including 5 years as a curator and programmer at Touchstones Nelson Museum of Art and History in Nelson BC. Jessie currently works as a visual arts programmer at the Arts Centre at Cedar Hill. When not supporting other's art people's art practices, Jessie enjoys working primarily in sculpture and installation. She is also active in local environmental movements including protecting ancient rainforests forests and wild salmon. 

​Laura Feeleus works mainly as a painter and fibre artist, with forays into printmaking and sculpture and installation. She graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art from the Vancouver Island School of Art in 2010. Themes in her work include nostalgia and a certain playfulness, reflecting imagery of animals, home, travel, and folk art, as interpreted with insights of contemporary craft. She has participated in group shows on the West Coast of Canada and the US since 2005. In 2016, she mounted a well received exhibition of paintings at the Martin Batchelor Gallery in Victoria, BC. She is one of the founding members of arc.hive, and participates regularly with the Surface Design Association, both locally and internationally.

​Barb Hunt received a visual art diploma from the University of Manitoba and completed an MFA at Concordia University, Montreal. Her recent art practice has focused on the rituals of mourning, particularly those of Newfoundland, and her current work is about the devastation of war: knitting antipersonnel land mines in pink wool, and creating works from camouflage army uniforms. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. She has also been awarded residencies in Canada, Paris and Ireland. She has been the recipient of Canada Council grants, as well as the President’s Award for Outstanding Research from Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she teaches in the Visual Arts Program, Grenfell Campus.
Connie Michele Morey is a visual artist, writer and curator whose studio practice focuses on materials and practices that embody interdependent cultural meanings related to gender and ecology through sculpture, installation, contemporary craft & performance. Her work is influenced by her childhood experiences living in rural settings surrounded by family traditions of masonry, construction, craft and textiles.  Connie received her BFA  in Visual Arts from the University of Lethbridge, an M.Ed. in Art Education and recently a studio-based PhD at the University of Victoria. Connie is a community arts consultant and teaches at the University of Victoria and Vancouver Island School of Art.  She  has exhibited and performed locally, across Canada and overseas in Europe, Australia and Malaysia.  

​Shannon Peck's art focuses on identity, attachment and loss, adoption and social conscience.  Her textile work has an eclectic range which includes unusual embroidery, hand stitched dolls, felted headdresses, quilts, sculpture and assemblage.

Adopted in 1970, Shannon’s artistic identity was born from a mixture of nature and nurture.  Her English-Irish-West Coast upbringing and Swiss-German-Czech birth heritage provide strong tension for this emerging artist.

Shannon currently lives on a smallholding in Chemainus, BC with a poetic baker and a flock of illiterate, belligerent fur children.  She is a member of the Vancouver Island Surface Design Association and is actively involved on the Board of the Duncan Farmers' Market. 

Regan Rasmussen is an artist / educator whose current studio practice focuses on mixed media drawing and installations related to resiliency of the human condition.  Her connection to textiles was inspired by a ‘maker mother’ who taught her to sew, knit and ‘repurpose something old to create something new’.  Regan holds degrees in Fine Arts, Education, and a Masters in Visual Arts Education.  Her art has been exhibited in public and private collections across Canada and the UK.  She is the recipient of national and international teaching awards and works as an instructor at the University of Victoria.  Committed to arts advocacy she serves on boards, conducts workshops and has coordinated arts events / conferences locally, provincially and nationally.
The diverse history of textile practice emerges from a long standing relationship with the land.  Textiles have protected us from the harsh conditions of the environment, originate from that environment itself and go back to the ecology that we are a part of.  As a practice dependent upon and interdependent with the land it is one that speaks to our shared presence on this earth. ​
​MAKESHIFT acknowledges the Communities and Nations in whose territories we work and live: 
​the Lekwungen (Chekonein, Chilcowitch, Swengwhung, Kosampsom, Whyomilth, Teechamitsa, Kakyaakan, Songhees, Esquimalt) and W̱SÁNEĆ (SȾÁUTW/Tsawout, W̱JOȽEȽP/Tsartlip, BOḰEĆEN/Pauquachin, WSIḴEM/Tseycum) Peoples. 

As a community-based event we acknowledge the history, lands and rights of the First Peoples of Canada.
MAKESHIFT is made possible by the support of volunteers, artists, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Atrium, arc.hive Artist Run Centre, Errant Art Space, fifty-fifty Arts Collective, MediaNet, the Ministry of Casual Living, Xchanges Gallery and the generous support of the CRD.