Rachel De Condé

As a child in Montreal, I spent hours poring over the National Geographic index book, looking at all the pictures. I emulated the great photographers and their adventures by building a blind in my backyard out of lawn chairs in order to secretly photograph squirrels and birds – little did I know that my sense of curiosity for the natural environment would never leave me.

In 1993, when I was 12, my family moved to Nova Scotia and in 2000 I entered the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University). Over the years I studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Regina in Saskatchewan and I was a resident at Harbourfront Center in Toronto. In 2008 I earned my MFA at the University of Washington in Seattle. Having now gone from coast to coast, it was time to come back home to Nova Scotia. When I returned, I worked on a dairy farm for two years and then, in 2012, I built a ceramics studio on my family’s rural property to surround myself with inspiration and to start making again.