Write Up and Art By Helen Yao
Graduate Women and Gender Studies Program
Mount Saint Vincent University
Unceded Mi’kma’ki Territories
Combining visual art and prose, Helen Yao created a creative project entitled "Abolitionist Imagination: Re:Mapping Canada's East Coast Prisons. Yao uses photos of Nova Scotian prisons and paints over them. Combining her artwork with personal prose with references from abolition feminist academics and activists Yao's projects reflects on the way in which insitutional spaces can be places for violence, and reimagines them as spaces of care and compassion.
Helen would like to acknowledge that the construction of prisons and expansion of policing is the modern-day continuation of colonial dispossession and that with this acknowledgement there must be a concrete commitment to dismantling colonial institutions.