// Past King Family Bursary Recipients
2025
Peter Mills
Peter Mills is an ecologist and artist based in Huntsville, Ontario. He works for Ontario Parks and regularly spends time exploring the Georgian Bay coast, including the French River and Massasauga Provincial Parks. Mills will use the bursary funding to assist in producing a book that collects some of his experiences with the natural world of Georgian Bay, and reflects on the value of wilderness, solitude, and the preservation of beauty.
Called Letters from the Broken Coast, the book is an anthology of five letters written by Mills while canoe tripping on Georgian Bay, accompanied by his own painted illustrations. Each letter takes its inspiration from a different element of the Georgian Bay environment, and draws on Mills’ knowledge in the realms of geology, spatial ecology, herpetology, plant dispersal, and the post-glacial history of the Georgian Bay basin.
Mills plans to use the bursary funds to produce a print run of the book to be sold in bookstores, at events, and through his business Boghaunter Studio. One of the intended outcomes of the book is to foster an appreciation for the Georgian Bay landscape and inspire its stewardship.
You can see Peter Mills’ work at boghaunterstudio.ca and on Instagram @peterbmillsart.
2024
Amelia Stea MacLaurin
Amelia Stea MacLaurin is a Toronto-based artist. Her background is in environmental design and she currently works in community arts. Her work is focused on the intersection of community, honest documentation, and archivism. Amelia works primarily in paint and photography, and is a collector of images, shooting with both film and digital photography. As an avid camper and canoer, she has spent a lot of time over the last dozen years tripping along the Georgian Bay and surrounding areas.
Amelia spent a year visiting, painting, and photographing the waterways of Georgian Bay and creating a Waterways Zine: sharing the exploration of four seasons of Georgian Bay Waters. She produced a documentation of paintings, photographs, and drawings woven into a physical, shareable, and tangible record of her time on the water. This zine is a time-capsule project, studying the waterways, wetlands, and tributaries through visual mediums over the course of twelve months. It exists in both digitally accessible content and as a run of limited edition physical copies. See Amelia’s work at www.asteamac.com or on Instagram @steamac.
2023
Katy McNabb
Katy McNabb is a cottage interior designer, and sustainable design advocate, born and raised in Parry Sound. After moving home in 2020, Katy began to research the rich history of the area, and realised the impact that cottaging has on our shoreline and ecosystems. Her project, the Rewind Design podcast, emerged from her passion for history, cottage design and sustainability. Season 1 focused on intimate stories of cottage history, and season 2 focused on sustainable design along the shores of Georgian Bay, with an emphasis on protecting the shoreline via green energy, green building methods and the maintenance and preservation of natural landscapes.
With support from the Georgian Bay Land Trust, Katy interviewed a variety of guests for season 2 of her podcast, including builders, contractors, architects and landscapers, to discuss best practices when building sustainably on Georgian Bay. The purpose of season 2 is to educate Georgian Bay cottagers and locals on the benefits of sustainable design, presented through her podcast and blog in an accessible and easily understood conversational format. Visit Katy's website and listen to the podcast at rewinddesign.ca.
2022
Peter Adams
Peter is an award-winning painter born in Scotland who now lives and works in Collingwood. Much of Peter's work has centred around human and natural landscapes intersecting. In Brazil, he began painting the remarkably grand and complex Amazon rainforest inside of handheld mint and cigar tins. These tiny souvenir boxes symbolized the human desire to take something home from our travels, and the desire of a scientist to contain a small specimen of an ecosystem for further study. More recently, Peter has been making paintings within the uniquely appealing packaging of Apple products, as a comment on the ubiquitousness of consumer packaging, and humanity's changing relationship to the natural world.
Peter's bursary project brought this work to the Georgian Bay Land Trust's Rose Island Nature Reserve. Peter hiked the trails of Rose Island, looking for artistic “specimens” that shed light on the unique flora, fauna and geology there. He then created larger paintings that reflected the island ecosystem, and exhibited these alongside the specimen boxes.
Scott Parent is a paddler, photographer, and filmmaker raised in Pentanguishene and 12 Mile Bay, and now living on the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula. Scott has lived most of his life on Georgian Bay and worked as a commercial fisherman and paddling guide. In 2019, Scott and his 9-year-old daughter Acadia set out on a stand-up paddleboard to trace the ancestral route of the Metis Migration from Drummond Island, Michigan, to Penetanguishene. Together they paddled nearly 500km across Lake Huron’s three bodies of water: the North Channel, Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Their journey took them across the most remote corners of the region. The pair collected water samples along the entire route for micro-plastic contamination research. They carried a deep water sampler with them and collected some of the first deep water data collected for Lake Huron. They also documented their entire journey together, for the purposes of sharing their experience and their findings. King Family Bursary funding helped Scott create a documentary film about the journey.
2021
Scott Parent
2020
Brennan Guse
In 2020, Brennan was a Master of Landscape Architecture Student with an Undergraduate Degree in Geography, always thinking about how to plan for healthy, resilient and inclusive communities. His research project focused on creating a waterfront revitalization strategy for Parry Sound’s post-industrial southern waterfront. As Parry Sound shifts from an industrial economy to a more tourist-based economy, many of the properties along the southern waterfront have become vacant industrial sites. Although the land along the southern waterfront is now zoned as Marine and Resort Residential, there has been little investment in decades due to concerns about soil contamination and environmental degradation. Results of the research propose a landscape-based approach using a phased development strategy that will restore the site to the point that it is attractive to development and contributes to community amenity. This will help the Town conceptualize the future of the southern waterfront and bring economic investment and improved environmental quality to the Region.
Read Brennan's completed thesis.
Art Tent, formed by musician Jesse Matas and painter Kyle Scheurmann, began with a shared curiosity and passion for creatively documenting the Canadian woods. It has grown into an extended collaborative research project, spanning multiple continents and exhibitions. Art Tent’s main initiative is to develop a shared understanding of ecological knowledge, translated across disciplines, bridging visual art, science, music, poetry, and storytelling. This is done by initiating collaboration between these modes of thinking, enabling hybrid research to be shared in each discipline. Through this process, Art Tent seeks to create new collective knowledge about the environment.
The Georgian Bay iteration of Art Tent included two trips to the region in order to record a wider range of ecological information, influenced by the change in season. Together, Jesse and Kyle created a new series of field studies: research taking the form of watercolour paintings, poems, and guitar riffs. This work documents the lived experience of Georgian Bay’s most remote and diverse natural areas, providing creative fuel for studio oil paintings and songs.
2019
Art Tent – Jesse Matas & Kyle Scheurmann
2019
Elora Grahame
In 2019, Elora Grahame was a Ph.D. student at the University of Guelph conducting research driven by her passion for migratory birds. Though she spent her childhood exploring the natural landscapes of Massachusetts, her ornithological fieldwork brought her to Georgian Bay in the spring and summer of 2018. She quickly became enthralled by the unique combination of open forests, wetlands, and rock barrens characteristic of the region.
Elora’s bursary project continued her research on Common Nighthawks and Eastern Whip-poor-wills, two nocturnal migratory birds that breed in Georgian Bay. These insect-eating species have mostly vanished from southern Ontario, and given their secretive natures, the causes behind their staggering range-wide declines remain unknown. With support from the Georgian Bay Land Trust, Elora unravelled mysteries about nest success and migration for these charismatic nightjars with the goal of improving strategies for their conservation.
2018
Sean Tamblyn
Sean Tamblyn is a Toronto-based photographer with a passion for Georgian Bay. When not kayaking the coastline and barrier islands between Killarney and Port Severn, you can find him kick sledding over the ice in the depths of winter documenting the landscapes, wildlife, and history of the Bay. His project focused on documenting the lighthouses of the Bay for the Georgian Bay Lighthouse Survey, working to raise awareness of their plight at the hands of the ironically named Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act. To date, only the light at Snug Harbour has been granted Heritage status, and the light station on Hope Island is the first to have been demolished. Sean had remote cameras out all winter long documenting the harshest weather over the remotest lights, and visited all the lights from Killarney to Doubletop Island over the course of the season.
2018
Kate Marshall Flaherty
Kate Marshall Flaherty is an award-winning poet who has spent most of her life enjoying the stunning Georgian Bay region—cross country skiing in winter, sugaring off in spring, harvesting the garden in fall, and delighting in the beaches and shorelines of Killbear Park, 4 km from her parents’ farm, in summer. Many poems in her previous five books ponder and reflect upon the striking landscapes that the Group of Seven depicted in their art. For her project, Kate created three short art films, integrating her performance poetry with the original music of award-winning composer and film-maker Mark Korven. Set against the memorable backdrop of Georgian Bay landscapes, these films highlight the jack pines and quartz rocks of the shorelines, striving to capture in word, sound and image the unique character of this region.
2017
Boshdayosgaykwe / Tracey Pawis
Boshdayosgaykwe is an Ojibway/Potawatomi Quill worker from Wasauksing First Nation, (Anishinabe Territory) Ontario, Canada. Through teachings received by her mother and ancestors, she recognizes the importance of celebrating a long-lived tradition. Tracey's project is a set of pictures in booklet form of completed quillwork that outline a recorded five generations of quillwork within her lineage. Quillwork is a skill that has been practiced for hundreds of years beyond the recorded works this book will outline. Learning to make and create quillwork has been a personal goal of Tracey’s towards preserving, protecting, and promoting her Ojibway/Potawatomi heritage.
2017
Katherine Denune
In 2017, Katherine was a fourth year student at Ohio State University majoring in Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology with a special focus on conservation and restoration. For her project, she undertook a comprehensive baseline assessment of the invasive reed, Phragmites, from Parry Sound to Twelve Mile Bay in the summer of 2017. The goal of this project was to enable and encourage future management and eradication efforts. Katherine promoted community knowledge and engagement in Phragmites eradication efforts throughout her project, and produced a guide to Phragmites identification and removal that can be used throughout Georgian Bay.
2016
Sylvia Galbraith
Sylvia Galbraith is a Canadian artist whose work includes landscape, documentary, and commercial photography. Her personal photographs have been exhibited nationally, and have won many awards. Through her landscape photographs of the Georgian Bay coast, Sylvia is examining the relationships between science, history and art; her visual references are rocks that have been transformed in violent ways, where patterned shapes in the present-day strata mirror the forces that created them. Sylvia’s work reminds us that there is an inexorable historical process constantly reworking the landscape – a process that continues in spite of our presence.
Mel Gausden is a Canadian artist from Guelph, Ontario. In her work, she uses landscape as a medium to explore ideas of memory and self while using colour to highlight the distortion inherent in our memories. Mel graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design and has exhibited throughout Ontario. For her project Mel spent time exploring different communities along Georgian Bay by foot and kayak and produced a series of paintings that present a portrait of the interaction between people and the bay.
2016
Melanie Gausden
2015
Kendall Flower
Kendall Flower is an accredited landscape architect with professional expertise in the areas of ecological restoration, design for natural tourism and recreation, sustainable sites and low impact development technologies, and community engagement. As the final component of her Masters of Planning degree with the University of Guelph, Kendall’s project explored, evaluated, and proposed alternative models to the relationships between policy, governance, and conservation in the Georgian Bay Littoral Biosphere Reserve. Kendall's project is designed to help all concerned gain a better understanding of the issues and opportunities in this area. Read Kendall's report.
2015
Jillian McDonald
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist whose work focuses on the supernatural and the capacity of nature itself to contain an “otherworldliness”. Jillian has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States as well as in Germany, Spain, and England, and has received numerous grants and awards, including the Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize. For her bursary project, Jillian produced a multi-screen video portrait of the Bay entitled Spirit Lake, inspired by the Bay’s spirits of land and sea, nature’s remarkable and unexplainable forces.
2014
Andrea Curtis
Andrea Curtis is an award-winning writer and editor based in Toronto. She has published books about food issues for both adults and children, and received the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for her first novel, Into the Blue: Family Secrets and the Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck. For her bursary project, Andrea has written a young adult novel based on the story of two teenagers’ survival at sea after the wreck of the ‘S.S. Asia,’ a passenger and cargo steamer that went down in Georgian Bay in 1882. Read more about the novel, Big Water.
2014
Tim Laurin
Tim Laurin is a master printmaker based in Innisfil. He has won numerous awards for his work and exhibited throughout Ontario and internationally. Much of Tim's work focuses on the theme of memory, and with his bursary project he has extended this to Georgian Bay. Using old Georgian Bay slides and photographs, as well as his childhood memories of the Bay, for inspiration, Tim has created a series of photo-based etchings in which he explores and brings to life human experiences on Georgian Bay.