Hazel Bell-Koski is a meeting place of Anishnaabe, Finnish, Irish, and English bloodlines born to loving parents in the temperate rainforest, and currently living in that same forest in the Pacific Northwest.
Holding a BFA in Film Studies from Ryerson University, and having maintained an inter-arts practice for the past twenty-two years in Toronto and Vancouver, hazel has had extensive experience in public presentation, facilitating hundreds of inter-generational community storytelling and art-making circles.
As an interdisciplinary installation artist, painter, and social innovator. hazel is recognized as a professional by her peers, participating and partnering in inter-arts and multidisciplinary community workshops and conferences with many organizations including the Toronto District School Board, Sketch Working Arts for Street Youth, Toronto Public Libraries, Transformative Learning Centre at u of T, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Grassy Narrows First Nation, and Rainforest Action Network, along with providing art pieces and installations for organizations such as the Wild Salmon Caravan and at events like IndigenEYEZ youth camps.
“I am a multi-disciplinary social artist, storyteller, and creative facilitator, and for years I have been practicing the art of inter-generational co-creation, gathering participants of all ages in transformative spaces. My jam has always been making art, creating spaces of belonging, working and learning alongside children, youth, and adults, sitting, listening, and joking with Elders, and being surrounded by colour. Oh yeah, and celebrating and praising this gorgeous spectacular stupendous beautiful earth.”
For the past five years hazel has been making and hanging flags, running workshops on how to create them, and giving away hundreds of handmade silk-screened prayer flags. She has witnessed the transformative effect these co-created flags have on spaces, gatherings of people, individuals, and even the forest itself.
“… I have been learning my own history – of my Anishnaabeg, Finnish, and Irish ancestors – examining colonial aspects of my upbringing, and coming to understand the meeting place of bloodlines which is me. Interwoven with this introspection, I have created a body of work exploring the themes of kinship and belonging, and the radical interconnection of all living things. The stenciled flags contain and offer an understanding of connection and fundamental belonging.”
With the results of many individual creative endeavours in her past, hazel has woven the separate strands into a large-scale, underlying structure, the concept of a Lodge of All Beings. And from this work, which consists of hundreds of stencils, silk-screened prints, and paintings, the PrayerStream Flag Collection was born and grew up effortlessly.
In her visual art practice, hazel has always endeavoured to shape spaces in which community can create together as well as share their stories. PrayerStream contains many of those stories and tends to generate a powerful resonant field when installed, taking on a life of its own which allows visitors to also open up to their own story.
Her artwork has been exhibited in many venues over the years, and the PrayerStream flag collection – the spirit of which calls to be hung in public spaces – continues that tradition, having hung in festivals, youth camps, truth and reconciliation gatherings, art shows, in the forest, and even at the local shopping mall to hold the space for an Art Crawl. Each installation is powerful, and encourages the quest for more exposure.
Kinship Flags is the embodiment of hazel’s stenciling workshop practice, which gathers community groups together to work on the creation of images of sacred life, adding more flags to the PrayerStream collection.
“Kinship is part community art project, part installation, part storytelling project and part flag- makers, with participants aged 2 to 82. Our goal: to make every image in the world. While we know this is an impossible task, we feel this is a good place to be.” hazel’s most recent Canada Council for the Arts grant was offered to create a website and platform which could support a new phase of development in her career, allowing an alternative interface with her audience, and the capacity to build community in the digital realm as an expansion of her in-person practice.
Her hope for it is to encourage youth participation and leadership, help rebuild our collective storytelling skills and, most of all, foster the art of making things with our hands.