After spending time with Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies, your attention starts to shift. Suddenly, you’re attuned to small moments and encounters. What might seem mundane – a conversation with a stranger, a discarded offering on the boulevard, the warm afternoon light –  takes on an unassuming beauty. You start to suspect that everyone around you is secretly a delight, and they’d tell you a good story if only you’d ask.

As artists and arts facilitators, Baird and Gillies bring a generosity to their work that’s infectious. In their world, ideas abound in everyday life, and anyone can make art, even if they may not know it yet. In fact, the city is full of budding artists in unexpected places, tapping into their creativity under the duo’s gentle facilitation.

Baird and Gillies have worked together for 10 years running art workshops in healthcare settings and community spaces around Winnipeg, while cultivating their own collective and individual visual art practices. Rather than separate components, their facilitation and personal work are interwoven, with ideas flowing from workshops, into the studio, and back out again. Art, in this way, is never an expression of one’s sole subjectivity, but a process of discovery and record of collective meaning-making.

One of Baird and Gillies’ most significant projects to date is an experimental animated documentary titled Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying (2024) about Edith Almadi, an elderly resident at the Misericordia Health Centre. The short film explores the powerful potential of imagination and the transporting experience of remembering a loved one. While Almadi’s quirky drawing style, bright spirit, and poetic language make her a captivating subject, the artists insist the film could have been made with anyone they work with at the health centre. 

This assumption that we all contain multitudes should be a given, but somehow, it’s a moving reminder. By offering their deep attention and care to people we don’t often hear from, Baird and Gillies push us to do the same, redrawing ideas of who we value and from where beauty might emerge. For them, this is not only natural but reciprocal. Both see art as a social practice and site of connection, and feel most at home chatting around a drawing table with friends of all ages and abilities. As Gillies put it to me, “unearthing personalities is my favourite thing.” 

The result is playful, affecting work that imparts a sense of wonder, while dismantling your critical defenses. It’s a treat to experience art that invites you in so thoroughly and leaves you more curious and receptive than before. Baird and Gillies orient us to something universal but also simple – the surprising, teeming life all around us. In an early scene of the film, Almadi tells us, with charming bewilderment, “I feel very very much alive…I feel life.” After watching her, it’s hard not to feel the same. 

Baird and Gillies juggle an impressive number of projects across their shared practice. In addition to their programming at Misericordia, they facilitate workshops at Art City and the West End Women’s Resource Centre and run the recently relaunched “Art by the Bedside” program at St. Boniface Hospital. This year, they worked with patients from the St. Boniface Hospital mental health program to design and paint a 300-ft mural, titled Outside Light, in a tunnel under the building. Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying has been touring the festival circuit in Canada and abroad since its release in May of this year. They frequently work with local artists and events, such as the Real Love music festival, to produce public art installations and animate spaces. Most recently, they completed a residency at Video Pool Media Arts Centre, producing an animation of overgrown cracks in sidewalks around the neighbourhood.

I talked with the artists over coffee in Gillies’ basement studio, a treasure trove of art supplies, projects and other curiosities, while his 2-year-old daughter giggled and ran around above us on the first floor.

 

 

 

we’re motivated by a desire to build relationships and intimacy with people through art-making. 

 

 

 

Gabrielle Willms: How did your creative relationship start?

Natalie Baird: We had a bunch of mutual friends but the first time we really chatted, I drove you home from a talk, and I was asking you about your community workshops and artwork. I remember being like, “How do I become Toby?” I was maybe 20, and you were a bit older. Then I started working at the community art centre Art City, where you worked at the time. 

Toby Gillies: Soon after, I was doing an exhibition of patient work at Misericordia Hospital, and I asked Natalie to work with me on it. They were all older patients at that time, and I thought their hands were so beautiful when they drew. Natalie made these videos of their hands painting and drawing for the exhibition. This was around 2014 – 10 years ago! Now, we’re in a moment where it’s like, “Oh we’re here, I’m not exactly sure how this happened.” Our practice is built on a foundation of many years, but it came about kind of organically. It became clear that we were seeking out similar creative experiences, and ways of working with people, but our recent animation project gave us an opportunity to crystalize an everyday art practice together.

How does your partnership look in practice, in terms of how you work together and combine your ideas to move forward on projects?

TG: We expect a certain amount of arguing and debating, don’t we? 

NB: There’s a process where we both see things visually in our minds and then need to find a way to articulate those ideas to each other. Sometimes, our ideas are exactly the same, and sometimes, they’re quite different. 

TG: Usually, your ideas are better, but I’m more excited. It’s a good, grounding practice for us to spend lots of time talking about ideas. Ideally we get to a point where we forget whose ideas were whose, and then we experiment, develop, assess, and so on. We've gotten very comfortable challenging each other, which might seem like bickering to an outsider, but it’s very healthy and good for our creative projects.

NB: With our recent film project, we worked on it for many years, but it ended up being only 7 minutes. We spent so much time just drawing at the table and having conversations, but a lot of those ideas didn’t end up making it into the film. In a similar way, because almost all of our community practice is shared, people we meet and conversations we have during community work come up later in our studio as inspiration. In general, having a close friendship and living down the street from each other means that lots of our everyday lives end up becoming art ideas. 

TG: We always have our feelers out for little seeds of ideas – visual or conceptual – that come out in one project, and kind of save them for something else. It’s sort of a shared approach now. I can see how parts of the present moment seem to embed themselves one way or another into the fabric of the project we are developing.

GW: You have several different projects on the go, around the city and in your own art practice, and, often, the two intersect and inform each other. What are some of the overarching interests that guide your work? 

NB: I think we’re motivated by a desire to build relationships and intimacy with people through art making. 

TG: And there’s a kind of feedback loop between our studio art practice and the work we do in health care settings or community spaces. Often, we’re exploring animation, filmmaking or drawing work in our studio, using themes and materials that emerge from our facilitated art workshops in the neighbourhood. There’s so much excitement and surprise in working with other people.

NB: It’s hard to make broad statements because we do many different kinds of projects, but we like to work with a lot of care and engage people in the process, whether they’re actively making the work themselves or they’re part of the creative process as a whole

GW: How do you decide which projects you want to work on? 

NB: There's definitely a recipe for what projects interest us. Part of it has to be novel or exciting, or a learning opportunity for us, and part of it has to live within the foundation of work we've done in the past and our ethics around working with people. 

TG: When we are approached to take on projects, we’re often drawn to the idea of getting to know someone whom we might not otherwise encounter, for lots of different reasons, and making those voices and personalities available. It’s also important to us that the project is done thoughtfully. For example, with our recent mural project in the tunnel below St. Boniface Hospital, we were able to pay our collaborators, who are patients at the hospital, a fair artist fee, which felt important.

GW: It seems to me that you also try to embrace some lack of control or element of surprise in your work. Is this an important aspect of how you make art?

TG:  We haven't done things twice, and when we have too much control, it can feel quite boring – we might end up fixating on things and stewing. A practice of accepting things as they come has been helpful and fun.

I always think of the foundation of that approach coming from learning print-making or ceramics as a child because, no matter what, you always lose control when it goes into the kiln. I’ve consistently sought out the experience of making things that emerge differently than I first imagined. At the same time, it’s helpful to have a set of steps, and then you’re just finished. I feel like I can never finish a drawing, or I overwork it. It still needs to have life to it. 

NB: My relationship to experimental photography is similar in that way, in the sense that you have a process to guide you, but you don’t have full control over the results. We use similar processes when working with people. We set out paths for them to work through so they can have the experience of being surprised and pleased with their work and have a sense of agency, but aren’t overwhelmed by decision making. We’re always trying to strike a balance between structure and openness.

TG: We usually need a vision or fixed idea to get started, but once we begin, we encounter new information we couldn’t have imagined, and we’re constantly responding and shifting in relation to what we’re actually seeing or feeling or hearing. 

NB: I would say that we’re interested in letting things emerge. Ideas are out there, and we find them. With animation, I’ve really enjoyed that you can make 100 drawings and then a single drawing feels like part of something greater than just one piece, and less permanent. I feel more kindness towards its imperfection in that way, or like the gestural aspect is more what it’s actually about. At the same time, after a long process of letting things happen, we do end up somewhere where a project is not refined, but resolved. 

GW: In much of your practice, you act as facilitators and connectors for people and groups in Winnipeg. How do you think about this role? Is facilitation a kind of creative act for you or almost like a medium? 

TG: That’s interesting, because often people ask, “If you say that you’re an artist, what media do you use?” And I say, “Lots of different ones.” But when I think about it, most of our work is connected to facilitating art-making experiences with others. We really encourage people to try material exploration or making marks on a page with different materials, and allowing ideas to present themselves.

NB: And this feeds back into our artistic process. The encounters and stories we hear in our workshops often spark ideas that we then explore in the studio. It’s also our internal method of working. We’re both experienced leading other people through a creative process, and when we work with each other, we use the same process.

 

 

I see art as a process for knowing and being known – it contains relationships, stories, memories, moments. It’s kind of a record of everything around it that allowed it to be created.

 

 

GW: You’re very much community-embedded artists, working in various health care and community spaces, facilitating arts workshops for people who may not otherwise be given many opportunities to express themselves. How does this work shape your thinking about what art is or who can do it?  

NB: I think everyone has an innate capacity for creativity, and if given the opportunity, making art is something most people enjoy and benefit from. We both come from a place where we see art as a way to be together with people and connect. I make art because it makes me feel more like myself, and I want to create that experience for other people too. I see art as a process for knowing and being known – it contains relationships, stories, memories, moments. It’s kind of a record of everything around it that allowed it to be created.

TG: My dad is an artist, and I grew up with art classes in our house every week. It was always a very social event. It felt kind of like a weekly birthday party to me. I’ve always gravitated to doing art with other people and felt really comfortable with people in that way. It’s fascinating how you can know and see people through the marks they make when drawing or the stories they tell when an image prompts a memory in them. It’s also a way of being quite intimate with people that we both feel comfortable with. It’s such a gift to witness the ways so many people choose to experiment with the art-making materials we bring. Art can also offer a kind of social inclusion and empowering outlet for people who may not have that in their current circumstances. I think a lot of our views are crafted by our experience working with Art City for many years, the best place on the planet. 

NB: Wanda Koop has this quote that’s kind of a motto for Art City, “We are not necessarily making artists, we are giving people the opportunity to think creatively. If you can think creatively, you can survive almost anything.” Life is a bunch of small problems all the time that you’re trying to overcome or understand or experience, and learning to do that with things that feel less consequential, like making art for fun, for its own sake, is good practice.

GW: Are you often surprised by what emerges when you work with people in these spaces? It seems like such a unique outlet for people to express their personality or inner world.

TG: That’s the best part – there are more surprises working with other people. And it’s similar in our work together. When I’m alone, it takes me two weeks to get the perspective I get right away when Natalie’s with me. She gives me outside feedback right away, so I have an understanding of how my idea exists outside my own head. When you're making art with people of all different abilities and backgrounds, there's just so many ideas and approaches coming out.

GW: You often work with groups like patients who might be new to expressing themselves or have a changing sense of self with age or illness. I’m sure new facets of their personality or skills emerge through art.

TG: Definitely. Patients in a hospital are often in a situation where they’re sort of uprooted. Given the opportunity to use art materials, they have this openness, even if they may not have been previously interested in art. It’s inspiring to be with people through that. I’m thinking of one person who has a significant tremor and makes these beautiful drawings by leaning into the tremor of his hand. He hadn’t drawn at all since he was a child and thought he wouldn’t be able to. We just said, “Why don’t you make drawings that record the shake of your hand?” And now, he’s so excited about it and blasting out paintings.

NB: It’s also a way to get to know each other. Someone makes a drawing, and then it prompts a conversation or a memory. People may be losing a way of being that they are used to - physical, cognitive, social - and through art-making they may be able to gain another form of expression. 

TG: It can become this lovely expression of the person, at a time when they may no longer have a strong sense of self they’re able to communicate. That’s a gift as an outsider. You can just appreciate what people have in the present rather than seeing this change as a loss. 

GW: Are people ever afraid to make art? 

NB: All the time. It’s very funny and sort of sad how often people tell us their elementary school teacher told them they were bad at art or drawing, and so they never did it again. We try to break it down for people, like, “Why don’t you start by just seeing how the paint moves across the page and not think about what it looks like?”

TG: I’ll tell people, “Start drawing, don’t think! If you start to think, stop it and keep drawing”! In the early times of working at Misericordia, I was learning that people at any age are just as intimidated by the fact that their mark making was a form of self expression. 

GW: This type of work gently undermines certain ideas about artistic ability or access that might hold people back throughout their lives, and even how we value people. Do you see your work as having a political bent or acting as a type of advocacy?

TG: I think it is inherently political, and, yes absolutely, is a type of advocacy, but that’s not where the impulse comes from. We just approach it as going to make art with people living in the neighbourhood. The relationships are very genuine and real.

NB: We’re just interested in getting to know people and finding out how to care for each other. It’s reciprocal. We get so much from these friendships. And I think our work conveys the actual experience of being together with people, who we may see or bump into in our regular lives, and the deep value of that. 

TG: It seems like there can be a tendency to not see patients at health care centres as individuals or recognize their full selves. We’ve met so many incredible personalities and people in our work who’ve impacted us personally, and we try to recognize and honour those relationships. For me, because of the way my brain works, all those experiences with a person are contained visually. When I see the drawings people made, it fills me with memories of that person and what we talked about, how they moved, who they were.

GW: Your recent film Don’t Let the Sun... focuses on one charismatic character, Edith, who you worked with over several years. How and why did you end up making this film with Edith? How did the concept of the film emerge and evolve over time?

TG: About 10 years ago, we started interviewing people about their own artwork and a lot of people would say, “I don’t remember making that, but here’s my interpretation of it.” Edith was one of these interviewees. So the first time we interviewed her was in 2014, and we learned that she enjoyed being on camera and talking about her drawings and memories. 

NB: And then at one point, in 2019, Edith was very sick, and we thought that we should go do a longer interview with her to record her stories and thoughts about her artwork. A year later, we listened to her interview again with headphones and we were both like, “Oh, this is amazing.” She talks so poetically and openly about love and loss.

 

 

GW: Something striking about your film was the intimacy and collectivity of the creative process. You used Edith’s drawings – often strange, delightful pencil-crayon drawings of flowers and sort of fantastical creatures – to inspire your own hand-drawn animation in the film. This involved painting over 8,000 drawings. How did it work to take up Edith’s ideas and develop something new that represented both you and her? What did you take away from this collaborative experience?

NB: It felt important to find a way to bring her words and imagination and her artwork into the animation. When Edith draws, it’s always with Toby or I or a recreation facilitator at her personal care home. She will draw a bit and tell stories, and we’ll encourage her. So the drawings themselves are all collaborative. Making a visual world for the film took some time because we wanted to emulate the feeling of her work without appropriating it.

TG: We think the way she draws is beautiful. It has a shake in it, it’s kind of crunchy, and she has this way of drawing where she’ll start a line, stop and look around, and let it bleed into the paper. We studied what we were most fascinated about in her drawings and tried to capture the feeling of her work in the movement of the animation.

NB: The film feels like just one possible foundation of work with older people in that personal care home. We try to create opportunities to share the work back with people through more permanent artworks. Toby recently said that we approach projects with the idea of “art as a kindness that stays put,” which I thought was very true – it captures the idea that working on collective permanent works is a way to record and share what’s happening around the table every week with people.

GW: How do you think about your audience when you’re making this work? Attending events like your opening at the Buhler Gallery in St. Boniface hospital or the screening of your film at Misericordia, I’ve often been struck and delighted by the eclectic crowd – of residents, health care workers, community members, contemporary artists.

TG: We often work in healthcare centres, which are these democratic spaces – we all need them, and we’re all going to spend time within them someday. There’s such a wide variety of people coming in and out, and it feels like an important place to be making and sharing work. Early on, we started having exhibitions at Misericordia as a way to acknowledge and celebrate our neighbors. People living in an institutional space may not feel like our neighbours, but they are. We wanted to find ways to share their work with a larger community of artists and the public. 

NB: With the film, Edith was our first audience and then the immediate community of Misericordia. We really wanted to make sure the film was for them. But it was so special to show it at the Buhler Gallery, where many people might be facing sickness or grief in their own lives. We knew it would be meaningful in those spaces.

When we thought about the audience for the film overall, we said, “people who have children and people who have parents,” which is essentially everybody. We think of stories like this as hidden treasure – we found something incredible, and we want to share it with people because it had such an impact on us. It doesn’t need to be an “art” or “cinema” audience. 

GW: Beyond facilitation, you’re both multidisciplinary artists working in several artistic media – painting, drawing, filmmaking, photography, printmaking. What’s your relationship to medium? How do these various skills and formats overlap or bring out different qualities in your work? 

TG: Our media are really varied, but our approaches are quite similar. We like trying lots of different things, and we try to find a medium that suits an idea. An idea usually comes as a response to a particular community or project that we're working on, and then we try to find the right sort of container for that project. At the beginning, we start by drawing or collage, writing or just scribbling on paper. Not quite observational drawing, more so note-taking from inside our minds and memories..

NB: A part of my personal process that I think we now share involves gathering a lot of images or interviews and having big piles of idea-seeds to draw from. Right now, we’re developing a new film project, and it’s starting with going to a demolition site in our neighborhood and taking lots of images and just spending time looking around. Sometimes you’re surprised by what you see. 

GW: What about animation? It sounds like your recent film was one of the first times you’ve explored that medium at length. How did that play out as a creative process?

TG: We started by looking at Edith’s drawings and what we’ve done together. Edith gets really excited about colour, and I was thinking about animation I had done experimentally that involved video collage and digital drawing and manipulating colours. Natalie was doing a lot of black and white ink drawing around then. Then we had this idea to try doing really washy ink and applying a similar effect to what I’d been exploring. We wanted the film to have kind of a unique look but also look like Edith’s drawings in pen and watercolour. In that way, we tried to bring together three sets of styles together.

NB: The animation process really honed our collaborative process. We started with a script from the transcripts of interviews with Edith and then slowly built a visual work around her words. Many iterations of storyboards, animatics, and animation tests over four years led us to an approach to working together that we’re excited to continue with new animation projects. 

TG: If you’re talking about honing the animation, we were fighting a natural inclination to hone. We had to develop systems to keep the animation loose, so it looked effortless and full of life. 

NB: That’s obviously hard to do over fourteen months of drawing. So it took time, and I think the repetition of literally drawing at the same table every day, week after week, led to lots of conversations about the work and the ideas within it. The animation continued to be refined – in a loose way – as it grew, and it revealed itself as it needed to be.

GW: Did you have to learn to imitate each other’s style in that process?

NB: Not exactly. We found ways to each draw on every animation frame or take turns drawing, passing the stack back and forth.

TG: Even if we were tracing or painting washes, you could tell it was my hand or Natalie’s hand. So we had to mix our work within each frame. One of us would draw a body, and the other would draw the head or the wings, for example. Maybe for sentimental or practical reasons, we both wanted to work on every frame. There were some things we standardized for a consistent look, like using a certain brush or making ink recipes.

NB: The material exploration was really fun, and it remained technically very creative the whole time. At every stage, we’d think something was resolved, but then we’d add a new element, and it would change the relationship of all the other elements. It involved constant problem solving, debate and creative thinking. We learned a lot about working with each other through that process. I’m maybe someone who will say less and Toby will say more, and we had to negotiate. Now I’m more comfortable saying more, and you're more comfortable listening to me [laughter]. I’m kind of joking. But I don’t think either of us could have made the film on our own. Having to articulate to each other also made it easier for us to defend our vision to our producers. 

 

 

 

 

GW: I’m also curious about your relationship to genre. Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying incorporates both animation and documentary, and has shown at festivals for both. How do you think about genre in your work? 

TG: I guess it could be called an experimental animated documentary. The project presented itself as needing to have live action and animation. We know Edith specifically through her drawing world, which we felt needed to be animated, but her context and physicality was also important to share. 

NB: I think that could be said about a lot of our projects. We are always trying to respond to an impulse to make something that people can connect to rather than to work in a specific genre or medium. 

GW: This film is a great example of something that feels true of a lot of your work – this ability to create this sense of connection to some kind of universal human experience. How would you describe the tone or ethos of your work?

NB: When I look back, a lot of our work is playful and joyful, with an effort to be generous and full of care. It depends on the project. In the film, we experimented with following lots of different threads thematically – ideas of life and death, cycles of being, etc – and then what was happening in our lives would push us in different directions and prompt different responses. 

TG: We started to see things through different lenses after listening to the interviews with Edith’s over and over again. We had to sort of assess what was resonating with us each time and then build the narrative from there.

NB: In that way I think we moved towards something that we thought could feel universal, through a very personal story.

GW: The film also explored grief and had personal resonances for both of you. How do you think artmaking allows for processing or transformation of that experience?

TG: Our choices in crafting the story are kind of a record of what we were discussing and going through at the time and what reverberated with us about what Edith was saying. It’s interesting to see it as a portrait of a time in our lives.

NB: When I first started working with Toby at Misericordia, I liked the idea of being able to meet people where they're at and just appreciate and enjoy them. At the time, my dad was quite ill and living in a personal care home, and it was hard to find ways to connect. So I would go and visit him and just try to be responsive and playful and creative with him in the moment. I think that remains an important part of the work that continued in working with Edith. 

TG: With Edith, we wanted to capture this experience that we observed in her of being carried away by a thought or memory or imagination to this other place. A place where she seemingly feels truly together with her late son. She has these different textures of loss and sadness, but also love and beauty and hope, and you can see her give herself to that experience. 

NB: It made me want to nurture and embody that in myself – the idea that feeling such grief is not a bad thing. It can be similar to experiencing joy and maybe we need to be holding both in order for them to be bearable. 

TG: When we started interviewing Edith, it was right before I had my first child, and I remember being struck by this older person talking with deep sadness about her son dying, but also this profound joy as she thought about him. She would remember him as a baby, and I was observing her thinking, “Wow, I’m in for something that’s going to stick to me.” Around the time we finished the film, my second child was born, so it really contained these two sacred moments for me. 

And then, just as the film was released, my mom died, and I experienced all the complex feelings of grief I had observed in Edith in a new way. I had this feeling that I’d observed in Edith, of how beautiful and real it is to get lost, just for a brief second, in a memory and really feel like you’re with someone who has died. It's such an intimate process to know someone like Edith, who isn’t a family member, in this deeply personal way. 

NB: I’ve been surprised but also not surprised by how touched people are by the film, and it’s felt so meaningful to share it. We made something very personal for us and Edith, and it means so much to all of us – and then to have people be affected by it, and able to see themselves in the story, has been really beautiful. 

 

 

 

GW: I don’t know anyone who’s gotten through it dry-eyed! It feels like a kind of gift. Can you tell me about your relationship to aesthetics in relation to this? I notice a playful, gestural quality in both of your work, and often, a strong relationship to bold, warm colours. Your pieces always seem to be generous to your audience. How would you describe your aesthetics, collectively and individually? Do you have a shared taste? 

TG: We have a shared taste, I’d say. We have our individual interests. Mine lean towards sillier, yours toward more serious and then we meet in the middle.

NB: I like making work that’s somewhere between joyful and maybe calm and quiet, and I’ve learned a lot more about how to lean into the joyful. Before the film, I was afraid of using colour, and now I think I understand it better and feel more comfortable with it. 

GW: How do you balance your collective work with individual projects?

TG: It’s a dream to be making art full time together. I do sometimes have ideas that seem like probably just Toby ideas, but those often end up being Natalie ideas too. But, yeah, I have some ideas I want to experiment with on my own, but we don’t quite have time for that right now which is fine.

NB: We both always want to have like 15 days in the week – enough time to make art with people, make art with each other, and make art by ourselves. That would be ideal.