Spend some quality time on the deck of Gallery Rossland Gardens learning about the fun art of needle felting. Cat Feraday-Miller, professor of animation from the Ontario College of Art and Design will be on site to teach you the basics as well as give you a special opportunity to experience her virtual reality game whereby her needle felted birds fly all around you in a virtual forest.

This fun filled afternoon will be held on the gallery deck, and her original felted birds will be on hand for you to view in real life as well as virtually.

Anyone and everyone is welcome, no previous experience necessary. There will be a limited number of supplies available for true beginners, but if you have had some experience with this art form, we would love to see you come with your own supplies and participate as well.

You are welcome to stay for one session or two. If staying for two sessions, there will be an hour break between them so please feel free to bring along a bag lunch. The Back Kitchen will also be open during this event.

This is an outdoor event; please be sure to dress for the weather!

Cat Feraday Miller

Cat Feraday Miller is a game developer, animator, and educator whose career in animation started with hand-drawn animated feature films and shifted to computer generated animation for films, tv serials and AAA video games. She is the art director/ co-founder of Rocket 5 Studios, an award-winning Canadian indie game development studio specializing in emergent technologies and XR experiences. Currently maintaining her animation practice while teaching experimental animation at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD U), Cat views narrative and character development through a feminist lens and is excited at the possibilities of interactive storytelling. Originally from Toronto, Cat has lived and worked primarily in cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto). Change being the only true constant in life, Cat is currently living on Amherst Island, Ontario – taking inspiration from big skies, open spaces and wild critters.

Birb Watching

The Birb Watching VR Experience is a cheeky take intertwining our contemporary obsessions with watching birds and consuming social media. Whimsically imagined, these soft, fuzzy birbs are born of Amherst Island, beginning their life cycle as physical sculptural forms. Sourced from local wool, the featured needle-felted birds are manifestations of the artist’s emotional response to seeing birds in nature, rather than an ornithological study. These birds are then introduced into the virtual wild: starting with photogrammetry scans, they are digitized, reconstructed, animated, then released to circulate as creatures of human fascination.

As a gentle bird watching simulator, Birb Watching invites active looking, engaging the viewer in the contemplation of nature, the behaviour of the familiar and the alien in our world. The VR experience encourages awareness of undulating relationships between the physical and the virtual, the hand-made and the digitally-rendered, and the shifting terrain defining art and craft. 

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, and technical artist/game developer collaborators Tim Miller and Corrie Shea-Pelletier, without whom this project could not have been made.