The artist-in-residence programme at the Visual Arts Centre (VAC) offers artists the opportunity to work in a fully-equipped ceramic studio among a community that shares the same passion for clay and its many possibilities. This year, a jury selected three artists to participate in our residency programme over the summer of 2026.
Join us in the gallery on August 20 for a presentation and discussion with the artists in residency from 6 to 8 pm.
Emma Ongman
Emma Ongman is a visual artist working between photography and ceramics. Using obsolete technologies, recycled materials, and process-based experimentation, she explores the poetics of failure as a way of engaging with systems of productivity, obsolescence, and value. Ongman holds a BA (Honours) with Distinction from the University of Guelph and has received support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Guelph Arts Council. Her work has been developed through residencies at Céline Bureau, Roundtable Residency, and Ed Video Media Arts Centre. In fall 2026, she will begin an MFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
Project description: During this summer’s residency, I have continued developing an ongoing body of work that combines hand-built ceramic frames with photographs transferred onto repurposed ceramic tiles. Learning new techniques in hand-building and plaster mold-making has allowed me to expand my practice alongside experimenting with different clay bodies and glaze combinations. Through this project, I create fictional narratives inspired by everyday life using vernacular photographs and clay to research how ordinary materials can be transformed into sites of healing, memory, and play.
Quinn Thibault
Quinn Thibault is a queer, non-binary artist based in Tio’tià:ke/Montreal. Having explored filmmaking, writing, sewing, and papier-mâché, they have now chosen ceramics as their primary medium. Largely self-taught, their works are simultaneously alluring and unsettling, practical and awkward. This dissonance lies at the heart of their creative practice, a perpetual search for balance between the extremes of daily life. They are greatly inspired by the natural world, particularly the defense mechanisms of plants and animals. Thorns, a prevalent motif in their work, serve as a reminder of this self-protection in vulnerable creatures and flora. These sharp extrusions are fragile yet dangerous, inviting the viewer to approach them with care. Other inspirations include horror and science fiction films, Art Nouveau, and wrought iron.
Project description: During my residency, I explored new sculptural forms as well as a concept for suspended plant pots. I worked to create pieces that appear both organic and artificial, like flower-vases emerging from a futuristic Earth. My plant pots are made in two parts that will be assembled once suspended, and I experimented with two quite different designs. For the end of my residency, I will focus on experimenting with glazes and the finishing of my surfaces.
Vinicius Sanchez
Vinicius de Aguiar Sanchez (b. 1987, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), also known as Vico, is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans animation, print, sculpture, and sound. His work engages imaginaries formed in diaspora, drawing from Latin American folklore, speculative fiction, and contemporary technologies. Through an ethos of play, Sanchez reorients inherited narratives and probes what it means to be human in an increasingly interconnected and technologically mediated world.
Project description: During my Ceramics residency at the Visual Arts Centre, I am developing a series of sculptures that reinterpret the act of creating ex-votos through a contemporary lens. Ex-votos and Milagros mark the return of an ailing body part after a promise or healing has been fulfilled — a gesture of release. Drawing on diasporic devotional practices and protective spirits, my sculptural forms transform the body into a symbolic site of memory, healing, and resilience. Through enlarged anatomical fragments, hybrid figures, and relief elements, I explore how personal and collective experience becomes materially inscribed in the body. Ceramics serves as both medium and metaphor in my practice, emphasizing fragility, repair, and transformation, while inviting reflection on rituals of care, gratitude, and renewal.