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Now based in Nanaimo, British Columbia (formerly in Calgary, AB), Studio M* recognizes the arts and culture as essential healing terrains for the restoration of sanity and nurturing the soul in the 21st century. Studio M* is a gathering place for artists, writers, thinkers, learners, healers and makers to explore ideas and creative impulses that don’t often get supported because they are not commercial enough, not comfortable enough, and are downright radical.

Studio M* is a creative artworking always in progress. We invite thinkers, writers, artists, healers, teachers, explorers and makers to join in co-creating a conscious awareness of the precarity of our lives and world. Clearly crises of all kinds are going to be the backdrop of everything we do. However, with wide-awakeness and co-creativity we hold the potential to transform the backdrops and re-contextualize new pathways to a better world.

Inspired by Nature

We are giving ourselves
the freedom to be generous
giving beyond our comfort zones
within a healing and gifting economy
you are invited to explore this way of being with us

In 1995 The Centre Gallery was formed in partnership with the In Search of Fearlessness Centre and Research Institute led by Robert Michael Fisher and Barbara Bickel. In 1998 they operated The Centre Gallery through the Arts & Healing Society of Alberta, and two decades later, as Studio M* is forming, we see that original mission still largely appropriate for today:

• host multidisciplinary events, creating community, encourage/honour diversity, promote children’s art and expression
• addressing contemporary issues, provide diverse educational and creative opportunities

The “M” in Studio M* is in reference to the maternal relationality that is primal to all beings in the co-becoming of subjectivity in the Matrixial sphere. The * further extends the meaning of the M to multiple known and emergent unknown possibilities.

In 2009, we encountered “matrixial theory.” Theorized by Bracha L. Ettinger, an Israeli-French artist-psychoanalyst-activist and scholar in aesthetics, matrixial theory offers a transformative framework for reclaiming aesthetics and the arts from the destructiveness of the dominant phallic sphere. It offers a renewed understanding of the complementarity of the matrixial sphere, too long suppressed. The imbalance between the matrixial (lunar) and phallic (solar) spheres has undermined the unfolding of a sane and sustainable world embedded in respectful ecological relations.

Studio M* extends beyond the boundaries of any one geographic location. We have hosted short-term live-in residencies for artists, writers and scholars who want to study/create in a research creation lab milieu. We hold space for ways artists can evolve in a residency/lab experience on an individual basis. Since COVID hit the studio has resided in our home space. See our Residency page.

We currently offer online classes, workshops and talks. See our Happenings page.

Studio M* operates within a gifting/healing economy model. Please see our Gifting page to learn more about how to support the gifts shared and to keep the circle of care flowing.