Pippa Dean-Veerman, is a Lake Country artist and educator who has instigated STUDIOTERRA online with the hopes to initiate collective agency through art. Always been an advocate for art- now more and more she wants to advocate for the Earth- for those more-than-human who are so affected by humans heavy footprints.

Pippa has been an art advocate in many places of learning in the Okanagan and West Kootenay since 1989, including UBCO, SD23, and the Arthouse affiliated with the Lake Country Art Gallery. Having completed her Masters in Art Education (U. Vic) in 2008, she believes that studio thinking and artistic process are inherent in all of us and foundational to 21st century existence. Being an adventurer, she aspires to inspire and enable individual and collaborative voice (‘me’ and ‘we’) with the Earth through art.

Pippa’s art practice began young, playing along the shores of Lake Ontario with her artist mother and siblings. Pippa’s art practice of conceptually based fibre/eco art/assemblage and photography invite a contemplation of place, sometimes in collaboration with other artists. In both her art and educational practices, local awareness, reciprocity and situation in place within the human and non-human world, are paramount. Having shared her ideas with provincial, national and international associations of art educators Pippa is now happy to cycle around closer to home, generating ideas in the service of our Lake Country Public Art Commission (since 2007) and art in service of the Earth we dwell within, hoping to inspire kindness toward and affinity with this Earth.

Responding to the Earth I feel impulses/inspirations to act within different mediums or collectives. You might see these as ‘projects’ or themes. They are delineated intuitively - the clarity of the meaning not always being conscious at the onset, but emerges with time as they develop.