Hannah Godfrey was working at the Cube Microplex in Bristol when she first realized she was an artist. Training to be a 35 mm projectionist—“it took me about seven years,” she jokes—in the Cube’s “anarchic” environment provided the perfect, scrappy setting to experiment creatively. For someone who didn’t go to art school, the Cube offered an incredible “sense of possibility.” Putting on exhibitions, booking bands, and screening alternative cinema, she was learning how to make things happen while trying them herself. “You could do anything,” she recalls fondly. She was part of a noise band that only ever played in the crawl space under the audience. She joined the skate team—“Some of us were really shit,” she laughs— and started making zines. One night, she was invited to do an improvised performance.  A wild New Yorker persona, “The Electric Kasey-O,” emerged, playing beats on her sister’s champagne-hued casio keyboard and making up songs about people in the audience. It was the ideal incubator for an eclectic, subversive DIY artist and programmer coming into her own. 

Hannah Godfrey became “hannah_g” at this centre, a badge-of-honour Cube email address turned nickname that lives on as an homage to her roots. hannah_g was nestled next to a hulking projector in the tiny projection room when she had a distinct feeling: “Oh, I need to go to Canada.” 

That was in 2007. Eighteen years later, Godfrey is a staple of the Winnipeg arts scene, nurturing the arts community in intimate and expansive ways. A writer, artist, programmer, and curator, she also holds a more critical, amorphous role in the city as resident connector, enabler, cajoler, and glue. When Godfrey’s involved, artists tend to take creative risks and something fun or unexpected is inevitably in the works.

The first time Godfrey and I get together, she welcomes me to her apartment, offering me a cup of tea and a slice of home-made chestnut, almond, and lemon cake. “Oh god, I’ve gone and baked you a little cake,” she laughs apologetically, as we joke about the vulnerability of a certain kind of eager hospitality.

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about Godfrey. Since I moved here, her name has cropped up so often in different corners of the city that I have the impression that I’ve always known about her. It might have been a piece of her writing, or someone’s nostalgic anecdote about the artist-run scene 10 years ago that first brought her to my attention. Over our conversations, I find I know both more and less than anticipated about her work. It becomes clear that her insatiable curiosity and creative energy cheerfully exceeds the sum of any multi-hyphenate identity anyway. I’m reminded that anything, really, can be part of an artistic project. The ability to make things happen is a kind of generous macro-art, a recalibration that makes things feel more capacious, unruly, and exciting for everyone.

Godfrey lives in a charming 100-year old building that backs onto the Assiniboine river and neighbours a popular diptych of tennis courts belted by sagging nets that the city leaves up all year. Dutch elm trees tower outside her west-facing windows, adding a few languid shadows to the warm fall light that traverses her living room while we talk.

The apartment has been her home for most of her Winnipeg life, with a stint in North Point Douglas and brief interlude in a different unit on the floor above. After a year, she slipped a note under her old door letting the tenant know she’d love to move back if they ever planned to go. Soon after, she returned. Now, she can’t imagine another home. “I’m very attached,” she concedes. 

As we wait for the kettle to boil again, she slides out a long wooden ironing board nestled between the kitchen’s work surface and drawers below, where she’s burned the names and dates of all the previous tenants of the apartment, including herself, twice. I start to sense her penchant for personal and historical wayfinding; evidence of a need to situate herself and a strong curiosity about the unwieldy histories that surround her. 

We settle onto the couch, and Godfrey’s shy cat Lily emerges and curls up gingerly in the crook behind her knees. On the north wall, hundreds of books sit flush on floor to ceiling shelves, with a section carved out for vinyl. Throughout our chat, as she gets up to flip or change a record, she seamlessly drops pieces of personal lore or musical context to the conversation. Each record seems tied to a moment of writing or thinking in her life. Several are connected to her family—the Virginia Astley record is a rare find gifted by her DJ brother-in-law—but others are her own finds, such as the Dido and Aeneas album which was a staple when writing her second book, Critical Fictions. Music, it seems, is sustenance and substrate to her creative life. (She even had a brief stint as DJ MonkeySparrow, after deciding someone had to start throwing underground queer dance parties in the city with the “quite raunchy” music she craved.) “Oh, music is fantastically important,” she tells me, “it’s such a magical thing.” 

 

 

 

 

 

As our conversation unfolds, I’m somewhat awed by Godfrey’s attention and presence. All my questions, no matter how off the cuff or inconsequential, receive her full consideration. She chooses her words with precision, pausing before responding or speaking slowly as she unfurls what is usually a remarkably considered idea. At the same time, she has a joyful irreverence, dropping expletives in excited approval, and erupting into a deep, full-belly laugh. She can turn on a dime from gravitas to absurdity and back, always maintaining a keen self-awareness.

Throughout, the brightness of her mind confronts you. One feels almost on display in conversation—pinned in the high wattage headlight of a roving intelligence, at the (kindly) mercy of a preternatural listener. Just as she gives her own thinking weight, she offers serious attention to yours. Sometimes, mid-ramble, I wished she would interrupt my half-baked thoughts. 

Like many events in Godfrey’s life, I come to learn, her initial decision to move to Winnipeg emerged from some alchemical mixture of impulse and kismet. In 2007, after her projection room epiphany, she arrived on Toronto Island for a one-month residency and was quickly enamored with the city’s arts scene. On the last night of the residency, all the visiting artists were invited to perform, and Godfrey’s drag persona Frederick Jacques was born. A bawdy 1940’s sailor with (another) New York accent and an eye for the ladies—“Fred didn’t always have a great filter,” she sighs with mock disapproval—he started gigging around the city after his successful debut. Godfrey ended up staying in Toronto for six months, working under the table, meeting artists and learning about artist-run culture, a feature of the Canadian arts scene she hadn’t encountered before. 

Back in England, she spent the summer as a crew member for the Bristol Ferryboat Company, looking out for Canadian jobs online, while, she remembers, developing a strange verbal tic of saying everything was “ace”. When a programmer position at aceartinc. (aceart) popped up, she applied. “I’d never heard of Winnipeg,” she tells me. She was in the hold of the ferry company’s barge when she found out she was hired.

Initially, Godfrey only planned to do a one-year contract at aceart, and then return to England, but the job was “just really fun.” Over her 10 years running the gallery, Godfrey brought the balance of rigour and play that I start to recognize as her signature. She was deeply committed to running an accessible, professional, juried process for exhibitions, supporting an array of artists to show in the space. She co-founded the Flux Gallery for emerging artists (with Hannah Doucet) and an Indigenous Arts residency (with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, now Indigenous Curatorial Collective), and provided space and gear to QPOC and Blackspace Winnipeg. In a systematic attempt to build connections with the community and bring a more inclusive approach to programming, she began paying studio visits to the 200-some member artists in alphabetical order. 

While at work on building out aceart’s infrastructure, she was intent on making space for the more emergent and playful. In the few days between juried exhibitions, she would encourage local artists to do one-night events of ephemeral or experimental work. She presided over a “Midnight Pie Fight” at the gallery two years in a row. “We put up plastic sheeting and invited people to come at midnight, all dressed up. I was in a ball gown and a giant red beanie, and we had all these paper plates with cream on them,” she remembers. Each person had 2 minutes to pie each other, and victory was typically somewhat subjective. “Someone went naked. It was wild!” she grins. During her first months on the job, she hosted monthly feasts, where she’d invite 5 people for a meal and ask them to bring a guest, and then the guest would be invited back and asked to bring someone new, in a sort of exponential dinner party that helped her meet and map networks in the city. Before leaving, guests would be asked to sign the tablecloth, a ritual Godfrey borrowed from her mother, and something she later realized might be considered part of her artistic practice.

Ashley Au, a musician and artist who worked as the Gallery Assistant when Godfrey had become the Co-Director with Jamie Wright, remembers “a lot of little rituals” in the gallery during that time. “When we finished an install, we’d get cigars and smoke them on the fire escape. On Fridays, we’d go to Into the Music and we’d all buy a record and then spend the afternoon listening to them.” The work space was social, vibrant, up for whatever. Godfrey admits she’s always romanticized certain historical artist scenes, and she is well aware that nothing is perfect, but she can’t help but feel that there was a special moment at aceart, for a few years.

As we wrap up our first conversation, I ask her what we should do next time. “How do you feel about roller coasters?” she asks without hesitation. 

Winnipeg, unfortunately, has a dearth of rollercoasters. She suggests we go to a wrestling match instead. Sadly, the timing doesn’t work. As a consolation prize, she sends me a piece of writing about the pleasures of watching this queer-coded performance in the flesh. “Attending one of these quarterly fight nights is to be immersed in a heady, campy eroticism, but the erotic is not just engendered by skin glistening in oil and sweat or unpadded speedos, and joyous, melodramatic displays as the wrestlers launch themselves from atop the ropes to rain down upon their foes and execute exhilarating feats of athleticism and gymnastics. The eroticism lies in their restraint, which ensures they do not harm one another’s bodies,” she writes.

Eventually, I pick up Godfrey on bike to go for ramen in St. Boniface. After a somewhat chaotic ride (both of us are chatty and easily distracted), we arrive to find the restaurant closed. Permanently. This prompts some loving cursing of Winnipeg. Godfrey is amused that I’ve led us astray. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me!” she chuckles, warmly. We end up at a very quiet Spicy Noodle House, soup fogging our glasses as we continue, in the local tradition, to lightly drag our city.  

When I ask Godfrey about writing, she tells me her first form was poetry, and she started in her teens. “I remember my first proper poem,” she says. “The Lioness. I was 13.” We both crack up at this. “The next poem was about a fish in a supermarket that had been vacuum packed.” Political? I ask. Not even, she says. “It was the pathos.” 

Godfrey completed her Masters in Modern & Contemporary Poetry at Bristol University in the UK. Her cohort was tight-knit and often ended up at the pub after seminars to “get drunk and passionate about poetry,” as she puts it. She started a project called Marginalia, where she and the MA’s tiny cohort each wrote a poem and passed it along for the next person to write notes and responses to in the margins. “You could sort of see when someone hadn’t been very inspired,” she jokes, “and then occasional flashes of ‘Oh yeah, they’ve got something to say.’”

After having a near daily practice, Godfrey wasn’t able to write poetry for years after graduating. She’d always been a free verse poet but something changed after studying the technicalities of the form. “It was like getting a kicking from your best friend,” she says. It was also around this time that she became more interested in the differences between writing and oral storytelling, and found herself drawn to what the more ephemeral, improvisational form could offer. “I met this group of older women who met on a full moon in a crannog with a firepit where we’d pass around the story stone,” she tells me, a perfect environment to hone her skills. “When I came to Winnipeg, I wasn't writing, really. I was storytelling.” 

She delved back into writing for her chapbook “Not for the World Would I Compare It to Anything,” published in 2018, a short book of essays and stories about “being alone, being present, and transience.” Unexpectedly, “I was suddenly able to write again,” she remembers. But it was after quitting aceart in 2018, thanks to a grant from Canada Council, that Godfrey really reveled in writing, taking months of uninterrupted time to work on Critical Fictions. “I said no to almost everything, and it was amazing.” She immersed herself in a routine of 5 weeks of reading followed by 3 weeks of intensive writing. It was like school without the pressure, she says, the chance to “pursue an idea and see what happens when you spend that length of time with works of art.”

 

 

 

Where traditional art criticism might assert a more decisive read, Godfrey’s work feels akin to an intimate, ongoing conversation, a record of joyful time spent with work that provokes "a kind of yearning"

 

 

 

Critical Fictions came out in 2023. Praised for its intimate, refreshing approach to art criticism, the book offers sustained critical attention to five queer Canadian artists who—more or less— work with abstraction. Each chapter is flanked by “fictions” inspired by the artist’s practice, poems, stories or tangential musings that respond to the artwork. Derek Dunlop, one of the artists featured in the book, expressed deep appreciation and respect for Godfrey’s approach to the work. It was a process of “sharing ideas and sort of brainstorming together,” he says, emerging out of “mutual curiosity.” Kristin Nelson, another of the five artists featured in the book and a long-time friend of Godfrey’s, was similarly moved by Godfrey’s serious attention to her work. “It felt like such a gift that I don’t think I’ll ever get again,” she says. One of Godfrey’s “fictions” that responds to Nelson’s work, “Homage to Hannah Arendt,” is simply a list of all the punctuation from the book’s footnotes. Referring to Arendt’s notion of the “world between” people, the short piece takes up Nelson’s project of contesting the “value of everyday objects, places and people who are undervalued or invisible” through re-evaluation and re-presentation. It “makes me laugh, it’s hilarious,” Nelson says. “It feels like, you got it, that’s exactly what I’m on about.” Throughout the book, Godfrey brings each artists’ work into a correspondence, carrying the ideas forward and expanding on them playfully through her own creations that “sit alongside [the] work,” as Nelson puts it. 

This rhizomatic curiosity says something about Godfrey’s larger sensibility as a queer writer and curator. Dunlop tells me her approach is emblematic of a “queer solidarity that’s anti-hierarchical” and flows out of “shared respect.” Where traditional art criticism might assert a more decisive read, Godfrey’s work feels akin to an intimate, ongoing conversation, a record of joyful time spent with work that provokes “a kind of yearning.” In Critical Fictions, there’s a note of resonance and self-recognition as she praises the artists’’ “subversion, humour, slipperiness and fluidity…rooted in their queerness.”

Oubliette, Godfrey’s exquisite, short book of quotes and recollections about her mother, Ericca, and the grief of losing her, was also published in 2023, but began in 2016 when her health took a turn. The two chatted daily, and Godfrey kept a notebook handy to jot down funny moments or memories Ericca shared. Godfrey’s mum was a willing collaborator, often asking after delivering a particularly good quip, “Is that another one for the book?” The project was intended to be personal, a way for Godfrey to hold onto memories she’d worry she’d forget. But after her mum’s death, she found it impossible to work on other projects, and began typing up the snippets of conversation and quotes from writers and artists she’d collected over those years that resonated with her experience. A friend at the publisher Nevermore reached out and asked to take a look, and the book came out a few months later. 

Looking back, Godfrey says that this period of intense grief held a kind of sacredness. Working on Oubliette was part of that. The book takes some inspiration from Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, as it considers the aftermath of “losing the person who remembers you as no other can; as you yourself cannot.” But it also brims with the singular joy of their relationship. Godfrey’s mum, we learn, is a fountain of wit and warmth, a connoisseur of small pleasures with great comedic timing. In sharing both her grief and a window into her vivacious, resilient mum, Godfrey invites us into a whole, aching spectrum of love and loss. 

Whenever we chat, another writing project of Godfrey’s comes up. Her omnivorous, experimental approach to writing reminds me what a flexible tool it can be for any manner of idea or question. She’s been working on a long “slightly miserable” poem for a couple of years called "Persimmons” mostly in the winters; she’s thinking about turning all the letters she sent to friends during recent trips to England into a book. Her latest full manuscript is The Midnight Florists, a quirky novel with autobiographical notes detailing a secret society of queer vigilante “florists” who wield plants and ancient stones with special powers in a plot driven by real works of art by Canadian and British artists. 

The text brings to mind Godfrey’s interest in rituals, folklore, and ancient stones, as well as her deep ties to England. Godfrey grew up in Billericay in Essex County with her mother and sister, close to an ancient woodland that they loved to roam around in as children, pretending to be horses. “Mum was always Dobbin, Marisa would be something like Rose, and I was always John,” she recalls, with a laugh. Her tight-knit family, old friends, and the landscape still hold a strong magnetic pull. On more than one occasion, we talk about how difficult it is to have your  life split between places.   

Recently, she’s been developing costume ideas inspired in part by the British folk revival—a more radical, inclusive movement with the same commitment to absurdity—and artists like Jeremy Deller as a way to explore homesickness and probe stereotypes from home. Her first, a dress covered in crisps (not chips, as we discuss), is an homage to having a pint and a packet of salt and vinegar (something she really missed in Canada at first), with an Elm bark mask that references her connection to Winnipeg. The costume is also an attempt to unsettle these symbols, and gesture to what they obfuscate or gloss over—the deep reach of British colonialism, for example. It’s early stages, she tells me, but she’s interested in creating things that connect with home, but “not being super earnest about it, things that will make people, make me, laugh,” while accounting for the “colonial aspects of this and being an immigrant.” It’s not a “nostalgia project,” she tells me, but a way of taking up, critiquing, and playing with the complex vestiges of heritage and identity.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One early winter afternoon, I visit Godfrey at Galerie Buhler Gallery in St. Boniface Hospital—“GBG” as she calls it—where she’s held the position of curator since April 2022. She’s in the gallery’s backroom, organizing artworks brought in by hospital staff and volunteers for a show she’s curating called Off the Clock. 

The job at GBG emanated from another moment of magic feeling, she tells me. “I saw the job and felt like I knew I could get it.” She’d had her eye on the gallery for some time, drawn to the idea of showing art in a space serving the more eclectic needs of patients, families, and the hospital’s community rather than a self-selecting arts scene. During the previous couple of years while walking along the river trail by her apartment, she’d find herself regularly looking across the water at St. Boniface hospital, struck by the idea of hospitals being these “incredible, complex places created for people to heal.” 

As Godfrey explains her role at the hospital, it becomes clear how fascinated she is by what the experience of art can offer, especially in such a multifaceted space of care, grief, urgency, uncertainty and utility. People often “use” the gallery here, she notes, as well as visit it. They “aren’t necessarily here to see a specific show. They’re here because they’re seeking somewhere quiet or a break,” she says. “Reading the messages in the guest book is really moving,” often providing a window into an “unfiltered” encounter with art that’s inherently serving a diffuse set of needs. For Godfrey, GBG is a thrilling space to introduce people to art, as well as a special site of responsibility and respect for what people may be going through. But her approach holds no condescension—she curates and puts up work that she loves and wants to share. She believes, fundamentally, that “people are intelligent, enjoy new experiences and appreciate seeing something different.”

Sometimes, she sits in various waiting areas around the hospital, and watches how people interact with the pieces on the wall. At one point on our tour, we stop near the elevators, a “high-traffic” area, featuring money from the series paper work, a conceptual piece by Briar Boyko which is next to a photograph by Diana Thorneycrcoft, Portrait of Winnipeg (Life is like a box of chocolates) featuring Forrest Gump, Princess Leah, a Jets player, and Admiral Akbar waiting for a bus. “A lot of people find the Thorneycroft one really funny, so that’s very gratifying,” she laughs. “It’s nice to see, oh, it’s working.” 

The gallery space itself seems to be the perfect flexible container for Godfrey’s simultaneously inclusive and experimental instincts. “I like the idea of the heavy lifting that I can do here, of being able to be both eclectic and serious,” she says. We can have a “really wild staff and volunteer show that’s respected as well as fun, and then put up a more serious exhibition.” She’s interested, she tells me, in “how the use of space transforms the space,” and the “deeply important” work of making art “part of everyday life.”

The next time I come to the gallery, it’s for a choral performance that Godfrey commissioned Ashley Au to compose for heart month, inspired by the special access they were given to the Cardiac Sciences department. Sometimes something called “respiratory sinus arrhythmia” happens when people sing together, Godfrey excitedly tells me in anticipation, where not only their breathing, but also their heartbeats synchronize. “But even more than that,” she says, “when seeing a singer or a choir perform, it's common for the audience’s breathing and heart rates to synchronize with them as well.”

As the Sonolux Choir performs Au’s piece Figure of Eight in the gallery, joined by singers from  the hospital’s staff and volunteers, Godfrey is in the front row with the altos, a red corsage pinned to her shirt (along with all the staff singers), gamely participating in this unique project she’s facilitated. Someone in front of me is sitting in their hospital gown, and two little girls who just met play on the ground next to my chair. The directors of Cardiac Sciences are seated in the front row, waiting to hear the work for the first time, after months spent supporting the project and touring Au around the unit. Photos of the Cardiac Sciences staff and facilities, taken by artist Charles Romero Venzon, whose father underwent open-heart surgery at the hospital in the mid-90s, surround us in his exhibition at the gallery, Cardially yours, 

The beautiful, eclectic three-movement choral piece features a rhythmic, repetitive opening, a dream-like voiceover by Au bolstered by lush chords, and a rich, crunchy finale. The energy in the room is open and supportive, despite what can feel at times like a delightfully odd collision of worlds—institutional pragmatism meets committed, earnest performativity. Everyone here, I think, must be hearing and understanding something a bit different, but our hushed attention suggests we’re collectively disarmed, willingly implicated in this provocation to try and listen together. Perhaps our disparate hearts are even syncing up. As the piece wraps up, there’s a brief moment of silence, and then Godfrey, beaming, brings out flowers to the composer and the choir directors over generous applause. 

On her way to rehearsal a few weeks earlier, Godfrey tells me that projects like this give her a feeling of culmination or grounding on a long path. She remembers a distinct moment in her twenties in Bristol’s town centre when she stopped walking and thought, impatiently, “I want to have a job where I can have ideas and make them happen…but also, what even is that? And now,” she jokes, “I’m going to a choir rehearsal tonight for a piece of music I commissioned. It feels totally bananas, it’s proper magic.” 

As I attempt to corral this piece, I find myself drawing on tidbits from my conversations with Godfrey and thinking about a recent MAWA event where her name came up, and someone said, affectionately, “Oh, Hannah? She’s everyone’s mentor.” I work my way through the four books I have on loan from her. I try her tactic of lying on the floor and putting on some music when I can’t figure out what to say. This is why she “never want[s] a coffee table here,” she tells me. On the floor, “I can stop thinking and leave some space, so something can land on me like a moth.” 

It feels like a little magic, hannah_g moment when I come across a nugget of advice from one of our chats that helps me get on with it. “It’s about having trust, that if you do what you want to do, what you feel in your marrow, that it will lead you somewhere,” she told me, “but it might not be exactly what you think it is.”