Sunday December 4th – Rev. Dr Holly Ratcliffe – Remembering December 6th, 1989.
Rev. Dr Holly Ratcliffe moved to Montreal about one year after the massacre of the fourteen women engineering students at la Polytechnique and have lived there ever since. As a woman of faith and more recently a ceramic artist who makes funeral urns, I will be reflecting on the kinds of monuments created to remember these women and on the film and plays that have been created in the wake of the massacre, which address some of the social issues that the event raises. How do they speak to us now?
While studying Anthropology, Holly wanted to sing and joined a church choir. She ended up several years later becoming ordained as an Anglican priest and has since worked with communities in a variety of cultural contexts. Since retiring in 2014, she has returned to her first love, the arts. She is a potter and does workshops on befriending our mortality. This year she is in Victoria as Artist in Residence at the UVic CSRS, working on a project of researching spiritual homecomings near the end of life and expressing these through ceramic urns.
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