September 2025
Jodi Griffith
For this month, WRAC features artist Jodi Griffith. In November of 2024, she moved from Lowe Farm in southern Manitoba to Lac du Bonnet area. Griffith and her partner were familiar with this community because, in 2017, they had already started transplanting their roots here.
Griffith’s most consistent artistic endeavour has been her writing practice. Thanks to Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way,” she recovered her creative self while working on her master’s degree in environmental science and suffering from “thesis writer’s block.” During covid, she started online writing classes with renowned writing guru Natalie Goldberg. Since then, she has continued classes with her long-time student, Sharyn Dimmick, and with writing teachers in Winnipeg, Amanda LeRougetel and Deborah Schnitzer.
Griffith finds time to write on a Substack platform, but also creates with ink, paint, fabric, photography, movement, and attends creating classes, workshops, and retreats. When asked how she learned to embrace her artistic inclinations, she said, “Probably through chocolate – that’s how I discovered most of my fun passions! I also opened to creative practice by making art in the company of my nieces and nephews when they were young.”
Regarding her formal arts training, Griffith admits she probably has too much when it comes to writing, but not as much when it relates to visual and other arts practices. That said, while she worked for Artbeat Studio Inc. in Winnipeg, her position there was Art Program Coordinator and Project Manager at their satellite projects, Studio Central and Upbeat Artworks. Being constantly surrounded by these artists helped fuel her artistic interests.
She has exhibited her visual art as part of a collaborative project led by Winnipeg artist, Collette Balcaen. Along with approximately eighty artists, she was invited to create an art piece with a hat from a collection of eighty hats given to Balcaen.
She said, “It was such an exciting experience to see the ways creative minds transformed hats into art and how Colette did the hard work of applying for grants and exhibiting the work.”
Griffith’s inspiring words: “Being stuck is a rigid, harsh, unyielding place. For some, it may be balanced by a softness and ease that must first be discovered by allowing and accepting every creative thing that you bring forth. Then there may be backbone and baseline to build upon.”
Jodi’s writing (pdf) Spark 2 2025 3 Mar 9
