Wally and Stella are family: uncle and niece who live 200 km apart in Canada. During the pandemic they were unable to visit each other in person, but both had Quest headsets and decided to meet regularly inside Multibrush VR – a co-creation environment where they could make art together, catch up and improve their skills. At the time, Wallace was the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council to teach and share virtual reality real-time creation tools and Stella became one of his key beta-testers. Stella created her first VR pieces with Wallace’s help and The Cat with a Hundred Eyes represents one of many pieces of VR elit Wallace and Stella created together during the pandemic.

The piece we will exhibit is essentially a recreation of one of our favourite VR pieces we made together over the course of the pandemic but was never saved. While working in VR together our focus was on being together and sharing artistic technique – brushstrokes, scale, innovation etc. – and practical issues around VR co-creation – accessing shared spaces, saving files, documentation. So most of the work we made together was ephemeral –experienced but not saved. There were many memorable pieces, though, including the one that we propose to recreate for ELO – a VR Storybook with 3D sculptures that also had 2d images and text imported – including snippets of poetic text – one of Stella-Charles’ key innovations and a crucial way work in Multibrush can be used in the creation of electronic literature. For this web-based exhibition we document the creation of the work and provide a video ‘fly-through of the fable .

Wallace Edwards is a painter, illustrator and the award-winning author of over a dozen books for children. His first book Alphabeasts, published in 2002, won the Governor General’s Award (GG) for Children’s Book Illustration. He has exhibited in solo and group gallery shows and paintings by Wallace Edwards can be found in private and public collections throughout the world. Most recently he was awarded a Canada Council grant to improve both Canadian artists’ and the wider public’s access, engagement and participation in virtual reality real-time creation tools and advance an inclusive vision for VR’s future as an expressive technology.

Stella-Charles Fisher is a grade 11 student at Elmwood School in Ottawa, Canada. She is a two-time Technovation finalist (a global tech education nonprofit that empowers girls), a Beneath the Sea women’s diving scholarship winner and a Believe Initiative National runner-up for her remixed game initiative Games for Growth.

Independent artists.

wallace.strachan.edwards@gmail.com

https://vrstorybook.ca/