By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Sheshegwaning artist Angela Jason recently created 25 player-of-the-game hockey sticks for the 2023 IIHF Women’s World Championship, held April 5-16 in Brampton. Shenoa Simon from Chippewas of the Thames, Shawna Boulette Grapentine from Rainy River, and Cathie Jamieson from Mississaugas of the Credit, also created 25 player-of-the-game hockey sticks each for the Women’s World Championship.

“There was a call-out for artists to submit designs — I was one of the 80 applicants and my design was chosen,” Jason says, noting that she had two weeks to paint the hockey sticks. “I did the profile of a woman’s face surrounded by the various provincial and territorial flowers of Canada. I cut out a bunch of stencils and outlined each stick, painted those parts white, and did my design that way.”

Jason, an in-residence artist at The Creative Company in Thunder Bay, is currently working on an art piece for a bat exhibit for the Toronto Zoo.

“They’re basically having a Sea Can with kind of a portable exhibit inside and on the outside they wanted some artwork on it, so that’s what I’m designing,” Jason says. “It’s going to depict the Creation Story of the bats.”

Jason has also created a variety of stained glass pieces, including a Three Sisters design featuring squash, beans, and corn.

“There were three women in the middle and they were kind of bookended by the plants,” Jason says. “Most people think of [stained glass] as things related to churches and religion and that kind of imagery, but … I think being able to take First Nations imagery and do it in stained glass has just some good symbolism and just a good message [about] something that could have been potentially harmful and just flipping it into telling our stories, not just those religious stories.”

Jason, who moved to Thunder Bay to study at Lakehead University, decided to leave a previous job at Nishnawbe Aski Nation to focus on her artwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a self-taught artist whose artwork includes drawings, acrylic paintings, digital art, and stained glass art.

“It’s a lot of personal stories, I suppose, and just visualizing a lot of Traditional Knowledge as well,” Jason says. “Through The Creative Company, our overall goal is to also inspire creativity in others so one of those ways we do it is with our paint kits, which is a silk screened image on canvas board. Each kit comes with all the paints you need as well as a sample of how you could do it.”

Jason says she uses a digital pencil and an app on her iPad to create her digital art.

“I’m able to create so much more because I can be sitting on my couch and working on a new piece,” Jason says. “If I’m trying to think of a concept, I can figure it out digitally and then for anything I might want to change, I can easily change it digitally before I go to do it.”

Jason says she began doing art as soon as she could hold a pencil, but didn’t start painting regularly until 2015.

“I was in my Masters of Education at the time and one of the projects for a therapeutic recreation course was to engage in some kind of therapeutic recreation so I thought I would try painting because I always wanted to do that,” Jason says. “I love doing it, it makes me feel good to be able to get something that I see in my head out into the world that other people can see and enjoy.”