The Shape of Solace Jul 2026 20m16s

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - And the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition by three local artists: Melanie Boyle, Karen McDarmid, and Jane Newman. They have just opened a joint show called The Shape of Solace. It opened a few days ago, drawing a crowd of over 100 people, and will continue through July twenty-sixth. Gallery hours are Fridays from six to nine PM and Saturdays and Sundays from two to six PM. The exhibition also involves some related events:  an Artists' Talk on July 17th from seven to eight-thirty PM, a Collage Writing Workshop on July 19th from noon to two PM, and a Solace Show-and-Tell on July 24th from seven to eight-thirty PM. The three artists arrived on Cortes by quite different routes. Karen and Jane's friendship goes back decades, to years when both lived in Banff. Karen says that "a series of misadventures" landed her on Cortes in early 2020. At that point in her career as a counselor, thanks to COVID, a job contract fell through -- and a month-long stay with her friend Jane on Cortes turned into staying for good. Jane had made her own move to the island a few years earlier, in 2017. After four decades of a life shaped by the Rockies she found a new relationship with wilderness, trading the inland mountains for the coastal ranges. She made a good landing on Cortes, and eventually became the museum director. Melanie's path was a bit more circuitous. Raised in Vancouver and Prince George, she spent twenty years in Michigan raising her own family before circling back to the BC coast -- literally, by means of a BC Ferry circle ticket. The island drew her in, and she settled on Cortes a little earlier than her fellow artists, in 2014. One day she met Jane walking her dog on the beach, started volunteering at the Cortes Island Museum, and later became its managing director herself when Jane moved on from that job. The artists are three friends who took three different paths to the same small island. But this is the first time all three have shown their work together. Until now, each had only exhibited solo or -- in the case of Karen and Jane — together, but a while back, in Banff