Sense of Place / Calls & Submissions

Overview

A Sense of Place invites visual artists to explore diverse interpretations of the universal human desire to locate oneself, and the many ways place shapes human experience, identity, and belonging. This theme considers place not only as a physical location, but as an emotional and psychological landscape carried internally through memory, longing, and lived experience within an increasingly complex and fragmented world.

Accepted Media

Artwork from all types of visual media will be accepted, including painting, drawing, photography, digital media, mixed media, sculpture, and installation.

Potential Themes

• Refuge and Solace: A literal or metaphorical location that provides refuge, and the sensation one knows or seeks as a place of peace.
• Belonging & Displacement: The tension between home and estrangement: migration, relocation, diaspora, and the ongoing search for where one fits culturally, emotionally, or spiritually, including the complexity of living between worlds.
• The Architecture of Memory: Personal and collective memories embedded in interiors, streets, landscapes, objects, and sensory fragments that continue to shape identity long after leaving.
• Digital Place: How contemporary life has reshaped notions of community and home through isolation, mobility, virtual spaces, and fragmented relationships to physical environments.
• Place as Inheritance: Connections between land, ancestry, heritage, and intergenerational identity, including Indigenous relationships to territory and culturally rooted understandings of home.
• Vanishing Landscapes: Place under threat from climate change, environmental destruction, and political instability, exploring impermanence, adaptation, and ecological memory.