sophia bartholomew: house holding

APR 10 >> JUN 15, 2026

house holding is a new installation by artist sophia bartholomew. In the foyer, a series of large quilts create a patchwork of photographs, each measuring 8 x 4 feet, the size of a plywood sheet. Based in Guelph, sophia grew up spending summers at their Mormor’s (Norwegian for grandmother) house in Dryden, Ontario. Between 2016 and 2019, the artist returned to Northern Ontario to care for their Mormor, which reoriented their practice to the materiality of daily life (our stuff) and our daily encounters with the intangible and the unknown. “Now that she’s gone,” sophia says, “I’m left trying to recreate the feeling of a place that doesn’t exist anymore.” Woven into these hand-stitched works is a pragmatic rural-domestic logic of saving and salvaging, repairing and remaking, and working with the materials at hand – including the artist’s drive towards proof of life.

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Opening Reception and Artist Talk: sophia Bartholomew: house holding

Thursday, April 9, 2026

6:30 – 8:30 pm

All welcome. Light refreshments served.

Join us for a first conversation with artist sophia bartholomew, a Guelph-based artist with generational ties to Northern Ontario. sophia shares how their memories and experiences of visiting their Mormor (Norwegian for grandmother) as a child, and, decades later, as a caregiver, inform her new installation of a series of large quilts made from family photographs. Their debut exhibition in Thunder Bay, house holding, is on view until June 15.

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Artist Biography

sophia bartholomew works outwards from the ruins and runes of their own cultural inheritance. Descended from Norwegian immigrants who settled in Dryden, Ontario, three hours west of Thunder Bay on Treaty 3 territory, their practice spans drawing, writing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video, articulating a rural material poetics informed by impermanence, materials, and change. Following a near-death accident in their late teens, their lived experience of fragility and permeability has had a profound impact on their work. sophia has presented their work at galleries, artist-run centres, and grassroots project spaces across Canada and abroad. They received their BFA from UBC and their MFA from the University of Guelph. This is their first exhibition in Thunder Bay.

Photo by: Richard Laviolette