A Day of Delight | BELOVED: Flower Crown Workshop

Inside of you there is a wild garden growing
sweet fruit of the seed buried deep and still
blooming; strength of vines longer and stronger
than any trial or sacrifice. You are a wonder.
You are the gift. Will you answer the invitation to lay flowers
at your own feet? Beloved, you are invited to gather,
adorn, stretch, rest, and rise again as we bloom,
build and meditate together on the beautiful
growth that comes from every stage of our knowing.

– Jillian Christmas, BELOVED

Event description by Jillian Christmas:

Join the Gallery’s inaugural Poet in Residence Jillian Christmas for a flower crown-making workshop, with a special introduction by poet Brandon Wint. This workshop is a Black Futures Month community care offering.

Over 90 minutes, we will engage in the practice of fresh flower crown building, but, more than that, we will utilize our time with flowers to connect us deeper to ourselves, our stories, our cultures and each other. Together, we will take time slow into tactile experience, paying attention to the small and beautiful details the earth offers as reminders of our own internal nature. In this way, we carve a path back to ourselves, so that we may return again and again.

This work is happening on the unceded, occupied, ancestral and traditional lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Feel free to bring anything special you would like to add to your flower crown or any item that would make you feel comfortable in the space.

Alongside crown building, this workshop will include elements of:

• A brief meditation
• A brief writing activity
• Attention to our relationship with flowers as medicine or for somatic healing
• Conversation and reflection on the cycles of plant life and the lessons they can offer us
• Somatic shake-down
• Braiding / personal braiding stories
• Collective dreaming about ritual building
• Opportunity to share

This event is free and open to the public. Capacity for this event is limited. Registration is required.

REGISTER NOW

A Day of Delight is being presented as part of Celebrating Black Futures, a series of special programming focusing on the intersection of art, film and poetry. Find out more »

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jillian Christmas is a queer, Afro-Caribbean writer, educator, curator and consultant. She is the first Poet in Residence at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Christmas has previously served as the spoken word curator of the Vancouver Writers Fest and Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Verses Festival of Words. Among her notable achievements, Christmas made history as the first Canadian to reach the finals of the World Poetry Slam in 2015, performing her slam poem Black Feminist, and, in 2021, she was the recipient of the League of Canadian Poets’ Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for spoken word poetry and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Canadian writers. Christmas has also represented both Toronto and Vancouver at 11 national poetry events. Her debut collection, The Gospel of the Breaking, was published in 2020. Christmas lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people (Vancouver).

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist and multi-disciplinary collaborator, who uses poetry to attend to the joys, challenges and miracles of being alive. For Wint, the written and spoken word are tools for examining and enacting his sense of justice and imagining less violent futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Wint has been a sought-after, touring performer and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry, while MY BODY IS A POEM/THE WORLD MAKES WITH ME is his debut short documentary.