Louie Fermor (they/them) is an autistic writer and visual artist and based in Moh’kins’tsis, in Treaty 7 (i.e., Calgary, Alberta). They have published and exhibited in venues across Canada and attended programs with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Sync Disabled Arts Leadership, NYU, and the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights. They have won awards in visual art, writing, queer community organizing. and autistic advocacy.
Louie is a disabled, trans, and living in Alberta; they have experience strategizing for well-being in a politically fraught landscape— they endeavour to provide a critical voice that speaks to making art within antagonistic infrastructures, and one that is also grateful for the abundance we do have. Through themes of archetype, history, liberation, activism, queerness, and disability, they explore portraiture and storytelling, including both the stories we’ve committed to the pages of history and the stories we tell ourselves.
“The Artist Androgyne is part of a painting series called Other Tales of Loneliness, which I created in 2019. I was looking for examples of queer history that mirrored my own—and it became clear that many stories of queer experience were of that very feeling: of alienation, loneliness, and a courageous yearning to find others. My painting references the portrait (Romaine Brooks’s Peter (A Young English Girl) [1923 – 1924]) used on the Penguin Classics 2015 UK edition of Radclyffe Hall’s, The Well of Loneliness (1928)—one of those stories.
