Body of Acres: the seasons of our inner & outer landscapes

An interview with maker & designer Celina Frisson.

Life has a funny way of syncing up. It is her transcendence through tragedy that brought Celina and I to connect on a sunny, summers day at Euspira.

Celina is an artist from Jasper A.B., best known as @thecreativetraveller. In July of 2024, a devastating wildfire forced the town to evacuate. Within 48 hours, 30% of Jasper was destroyed - both of Celina's business included. Below, we talk about BODY OF ACRES - her first official collection since starting over. A message about embodying the grain of nature. A testament to beginning again.

BODY OF ACRES explores the parallels between the seasons of nature and the female hormonal cycle. What inspired you to make that connection the foundation of this work?

CF: I had gone through so much grief. Not only did I lose everything in the wildfire, I had to move my community. I didn’t have my studio. I didn’t have all the things that I’d attached my identity to. What ended up happening was that I had this yard sale of all of the debris that started to come up with my grief - it wasn’t just some isolated thing that happened like, oh, my stuff burned. It was like, everything had to come up. I was asking myself “if you’re gonna start over, what are you bringing with you into the next chapter? Who am I now without all of these things?”

So I come here, to the island you know, and it was raining. A lot. I was just sitting inside. A lot. I was fully in this internal Winter and being really quiet. Which is actually a huge privilege. We don’t often get that space. Aside from throughout Covid, I’d never had a pause like that in my life where I was able to reassess, like, what’s really going on in my world? And to fully pick it apart. I realized I was being asked to heal and that I had been expending so much energy. So, I had taken all this energy that I was pouring outwards into my community and I started putting it inwards. This was the beginning of a new direction.

SM: Chatting prior to this, you had mentioned that you went off birth control a year ago and that doing so had deepened your knowledge of your own internal seasons.

CF: Exactly. That really changed how I was seeing sitting in Winter and being still. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is actually just sit still. This is where ideas come in. A lot of the times when we’re trying to cultivate conversation or new ideas, we’re forcing our way into it. But if you sit still long enough, they just start to move up and out of you. You just have to wait. Unfortunately, it’s just not praised to do so.

SM: Yeah, it’s almost deemed a waste of time to listen, act and respond intuitively.

CF: I completely agree. A ‘waste of time’ to sit in your bed and be sad. But that’s what I needed to do. I needed to winter hard, sit in my bed and listen to the rain fall. Slowly, the more I did that, all these new ideas started presenting themselves. New work was coming out of me without having a studio, without having all these things. I began to realize like, oh, that didn’t take away my creativity at all. It just expanded it. 

SM: So, wintering. The foundation of BODY OF ACRES.

CF: Truly. Yeah. Everything had to die. Everything needed to be stripped away.

So all these new ideas start coming to life. Can you walk us through your creative process?

CF: Part of the healing was doing the inner child work. So I was starting to look back at the things that made me excited as a kid. I remember having these little wires that you could dip into a gel and they would turn out almost like stained glass.

SM: Dip resin I think. Flower making liquid.

CF: Yeah yeah yeah. Iconic. But I was like, well, I don’t have a studio so I can’t make stained glass. Like, I live in a little cottage in the woods! The only thing I really had access to was wire. So I made this really small version of a lamp, went and found some fabric and I just kind of manufactured this lamp. I had a friend come over and she saw this little piece I had made and she said “In the best way possible, this looks like something you would have made when you were 13” and I was like, yeah. That is literally what was happening. I was on the fun curiosity train where I didn’t really know what I was doing with it but I was having fun doing it.

Can you elaborate on how your own lived experience, or the stories of others, shaped the emotional layers within this work?

CF: I realized I had the wrong idea of what it meant to show up as a community member and to be living in a matriarchal way. While I was in Jasper, I was providing a space, doing all this upfront work, labouring to get all these things for other people. What I had learned was if you reverse that and you start taking care of yourself first, you will overflow. 

I had this ceramic mentor and he helped me create a collection right after the fire. We got to do this amazing wood fire kiln. It was so cool. I felt so guilty because I wasn’t able to repay him. I had nothing to give. I thought ‘in another life, I’d be able to just like, give you the world’. Fast forward 8 months, I have my energy back and I end up meeting all these amazing people in the community. One of the girls says “Hey, do you know someone in this age category for a well paid photoshoot?” and I was like “Yeah, actually, I do.” I took care of myself, and it allowed me to take care of my people. It doesn’t always have to be labour. You don’t always have to muscle your way through to help others. You know what I mean?

SM: I do, yeah.

"This is the first year that I’ve been making work that’s from a very honest place."

What conversations do you hope these pieces will spark about the female body and its relationship to the natural world in this space?

CF: Oh, I love that. I think what’s really important is like, we’re shifting and changing depending on where we’re at in our cycles. You can look in the mirror and see yourself differently. So I hope that they can bring whoever is in, the grace that they might need to give themselves a big hug, you know? We’re so hard on ourselves and just having that full acceptance to be like, okay, this is where I’m at right now and that’s perfectly okay.

SM: Mmm. I think that will happen so naturally as those are definitely conversations that are had here. Trying on clothes can be so uncomfortable. More often than not, folks are shopping in this funny head space, looking to comfort or to numb. Retail therapy is a real thing. I see it a lot. So when an opportunity is there to make someone soften and come back into their body, I jump on it. Lots of healing is had in these change rooms. 

CF: I feel that so much. That is a conversation I hope everyone experiences. I just picture, like, 17 year old Celina who struggled so much with body image. I really wish that somebody would have been on the other side of the change room being like “You’re beautiful. You’re fine.”

SM: You are beautiful. You are fine.

For external seasons we have Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Could you go over what the stages are for our internal seasons?

CF: Yes. The first day of your bleed is the first day of a new cycle, the Menstrual cycle, which is Winter. You're hibernating. You’re cozy. You’re still. Then there’s the Follicular, which is Spring. You’re feeling a little bit more giddy. You might be a little more focused. You’re gearing up for your Ovulation, which is summer. Full Bloom. We all know and love Ovulation. Eggs are dropping. Colours are colouring. You’re magnetic. Then we gear down into Autumn, the Luteal phase. You want to nest. You start to tie up projects. It’s a great time to wrap up any admin, any loose strings. It’s organization energy, prepping us for Winter again. 

Do you see yourself continuing to explore cycles of both the body and nature in future works?

CF: I feel like that is the baseline of my work. This is also the closest that I’ve felt to my work since being an artist. What I’m making feels authentic. I think when I was living in the mountains, God Bless, I was making a lot of work that would perform well. That I thought was wanted and desired. This is the first year that I’ve been making work that’s from a very honest place. Not thinking about what’s going to look good on the shelf. Rather, what do I actually want to create? What feels truthful right now?

I’m looking at this beautiful piece of work right now leaned up against the sweaters. Can you talk to me about her?

CF: Yeah. Autumn. This one’s a hard one. It was hard when I was making it. I was in my personal Autumn at the time. There were a lot of different thought spirals going on. Ultimately, it's decay. It's carnage. It’s like, what is going back into the soil for the next season? I love looking at the leaves as a lesson. When they fall and make a carpet it’s this beautiful idea of reincarnation. They need to be put back into the soil so that they can come back into a new form next season. This is what happened during the fire, right. Everything died. Everything was scorched to the ground. Bare bones. This is the hardest season, but it feels like the most important one because you’re really asked to look at everything.

A perfect segue into the last question. All around us, nature is starting to release. Leaves are falling, letting go. In service of opening and creating space for something new to emerge, what are you ready to release?

CF: Pathologizing sadness. Or demonizing the death of something, as it’s actually a space of rebirth. Just because I had a “bad experience” is it actually a bad experience if it leads me to something else? Yeah… What I would like to release is not pathologizing too many things.

Celina wears the Barrel Pant and Dream Tee.

Stay up to date with Celina's offerings here.

BODY OF ACRES is available to view at Euspira. Purchase inquiries encouraged.

This conversation has been condensed for clarity.