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2530 Bevan Ave | Sidney, BC V8L 1W3, Canada 250-655-1722

Serenade

Sandy Terry Acrylic on Deep Canvas 30" x 70"

Serenade
wetlands wife cbaby jd work

"Santa's Rally" Holiday Exhibition

December 6 - December 24, 2025

The holiday season has arrived, and we’re delighted to unveil our annual special exhibition. This year is particularly meaningful as we celebrate our very first holiday in our new location! With the gallery nearing its 40th anniversary next year, we’ve also given our holiday show a refreshing new title, transitioning from “Santa’s Chest” to “Santa’s Rally”.

New works from our artists continue to come in, and we’ve been joyfully arranging them into a festive display, though figuring out how to fit everything on the walls is a royal challenge! If you haven’t had a chance to visit our new space yet, we’d love to welcome you. Come see what’s new and we’re sure you’ll be delighted!

And if you’re not nearby, no worries! All artworks can be viewed on our website, and we ship worldwide. If you’re purchasing a piece as a Christmas gift, we’ll do everything we can to ensure it arrives on or before December 24th.

Enter To View The Show Now!

wetlands wife cbaby jd work

Josephine Fletcher Spotlight

November 29 - December 20, 2025

We are thrilled to announce our next Spotlight Show, dedicated entirely to the vibrant and evocative work of Josephine Fletcher (Josi), the beloved Salt Spring Island painter whose landscapes pulse with the wild beauty of the West Coast.

Josi’s paintings are a celebration of colour and light, born from her deep connection to the landscapes that surround her. Nurtured amid the artistic community of Hornby Island and now thriving on Salt Spring, her bold, painterly strokes evoke the transcendental spirit of nature: arbutus groves bending in the wind, sandstone shores kissed by the sea, and the fleeting glow of a full moon over Fulford Harbour. Influenced by the Fauves and the quiet power of Emily Carr, her work is both masterful and deeply personal, a love letter to the Gulf Islands she calls home.

Since Josi joined our gallery's roster in 2022, her bold, unapologetic paintings have sparked lively (and sometimes heated!) conversations among artists, collectors, and visitors alike. Far from shying away, we’ve welcomed the energy! I’m absolutely delighted to share that Josi has just been awarded one of the top honours from the 2025 Salt Spring National Art Prize (SSNAP): the prestigious Salon des Refusés Solo Exhibition Prize. This remarkable recognition is a thrilling reaffirmation of the vision, courage, and sheer talent that first drew us to Josi’s work, and that continues to captivate (and occasionally provoke) everyone who steps in front of her canvases.

Josi will be at the gallery on Saturday November 29 to meet and greet from 11am to 3pm. Whether you’re a longtime admirer of Josephine’s transcendent visions or discovering her passion for the first time, please join us! Wine, warmth, and wonderful company guaranteed!

Enter To View The Show Now!

Wetlands Wife Cbaby Jd Work Info

Neighbors come sometimes, with questions about drainage or fences, with stories of an old house and a new development. She listens and measures her words. There are petitions and community meetings, signatures and the slow machinery of law — JD files forms, explains how buffers work, draws lines on maps. She watches the papers pile up like autumn leaves. Work spills into domesticity and back again; the distinction frays until the two are braided like reed and root.

JD comes and goes like the tide in her life — not quite an emptiness, not quite a shore. He carries a clipboard and a smell of diesel, tracks of practical things: permits, measurements, who said what at the town meeting. He talks of mitigation banks and contour lines, of deadlines like nails hammered into the future. Sometimes they argue in low voices over coffee gone cold; sometimes they stand together and watch a heron cut the air and let the world explain itself to them. When he watches her when she works, his eyes are catalogues of admiration and regret, a ledger that does not balance.

At dusk they burn brush in a careful stripe so fire will not take what needs saving. The flames lisp and die; the smoke smells like cedar and decisions. The baby’s eyes catch the spark and she hums a tune that is older than the zoning ordinances JD reads at the table. It is a song about anchoring: of roots learning to keep water and of people learning to keep water within themselves.

She dreams in tidal patterns: of breeding seasons and ballots, of a community that learns to listen to slow wet things. She imagines Cbaby, older, walking the boardwalk with hands in pockets, calling out invasive species with a knowledge that tastes like belonging. JD stands a few steps behind, clipboard abandoned, watching the child she bore and the place she saved. wetlands wife cbaby jd work

When winter presses in she preserves: mason jars of pickled marsh berries, dried samples labeled in JD’s neat script, a ledger of frost dates. They count expenditures and blessings together, balancing the budget and the blessing. In the gray space between obligations and love, she finds that the marsh keeps answering, in its patient way, with rebirth.

Wetlands Wife, Cbaby, JD — Work

If the marsh is a language, then her life is a translation — a constant, attentive translation of wetness into care, of regulation into ritual, of paperwork into promise. She is not a savior; she is a gardener for the watery edges of the world, tending what most people hurry past. Her work is not a spectacle but a species of persistence: quiet, resolute, deep as peat. Neighbors come sometimes, with questions about drainage or

She keeps the damp earth in her palms like a secret, palms cupped so the water remembers the shape of her hands. Morning comes in a chorus of mosquito hums and her breath fogs above the creek; the cattails lean in as if to listen. She moves along the board of rotten planks, each step a negotiation with soft wood and sinking bog, balancing the smallness of her intentions against the vast, indifferent wetness.

They argue, sometimes until the dawn swallows the last syllable, then plant a seed together in silence. They mark each small victory: the return of a frog chorus, an oyster bed that survives a salt surge, a neighbor who signs a petition. Joy here is granular — small birdsong between meetings, a sapling that holds through a storm, the baby’s first word: water.

Wetlands wife, Cbaby, JD — they are names in a ledger of living. The marsh is the constant, the work the ongoing question, and their days are the slow proof that tending, even at the edge of water and law, is a kind of resistance. She watches the papers pile up like autumn leaves

At night she traces the constellations and counts the things not yet named. There is an ache she keeps close, a kind of soft gravity that tethers her to this place even as municipal plans and market forces tug at the edges. JD’s work is both ballast and friction: he brings practical lifelines and, at times, the bureaucratic hands that threaten to reframe the marsh as an asset class. They navigate that tension like a river finding a path — sometimes clear, other times braided and wild.

Cbaby sleeps in a sling at her chest, a warm, slow drum against her sternum. The child’s fingers curl and uncurl, tasting the rhythm of her heartbeat. When he wakes, the world is only what she points to: the silver flash of a minnow, the coal-dark mud that holds the bones of old things, the webbed footprints of raccoons like punctuation at the water’s edge. She teaches him names that are half-lullaby and half-instruction — reed, sedge, marsh tea — so that even speech becomes a tool for tending, for remembering what lives here.

Work here is less about production and more about attention. It is learning hydrographs and the slow patience of spore and seed. It is knowing which plants will forgive a footstep and which will never recover. She maps the wetness in the soles of her boots and in the way the sky sits over the marsh, in the small mathematics of light and shadow that determines whether the sap will rise. Her hands are caked with the history of yesterday’s rain and with the promise of tomorrow’s growth.

Cbaby grows with the marsh. His laughter takes on the ribbed quality of wind through reeds. He learns to step over root and to carry a sapling without breaking it — first careful, then confident. He collects snail shells like currency. Sometimes he tips his face to the rain and lets the small drops baptize him into the place. She thinks of the future in terms of who will recognize the wetness as treasure and who will call it a problem to be solved.