Julya Hajnoczky

CAAF Residency, April – June 2021

During her residency, Julya will be working on a project called Bloom. The word “bloom” is used to describe a large swarm of jellyfish, and also the “rapid and excessive growth” of a population of small marine life such as algae. Nowadays, the term could also be applied to the rapid and excessive growth in the amount of plastics that find their way to our oceans. Similarly, climate change and other factors such as overfishing are shifting the balance of marine organisms in strange and dramatic ways, including enormous blooms of jellyfish occurring at unsettlingly high rates across Earth’s oceans.

Julya will be gathering discarded single-use and recyclable plastics and using these materials to build hundreds of three-dimensional jellyfish that will ultimately be suspended together in an installation—a bloom or swarm within the CAAF studio space.

We acknowledge the generous support of the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and of Calgary Arts Development.