Several artful pursuits

Canning resident Basma Kavanagh excels as writer, visual artist

While many of people struggle with becoming proficient in one discipline, Basma Kavanagh is one of those rare people who excels at two.

“I always had that inclination,” said the artist who also writes. “I feel all of them are connected but I do find sometimes I tend to concentrate on one thing for a while. It might be a period of months or years and then something else for a while. They all kind of feed each other and they’re definitely connected. It takes time to become proficient at one thing. It can be hard to juggle them because I find to keep current and be proficient you have to give it time so it can be a crazy juggling and sometimes I think, why don’t I just pick one?

“But I can’t.”

Kavanagh was recently named to the longlist of the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize for her essay Bone Shadows, which reflects on the many forms of grief in the years following her father’s death.

While she didn’t win, it’s still national recognition for her writing which also includes three books of poetry, Distillo, Niche and Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots.

“I was surprised but pleased,” said Kavanagh from her home in Canning. “It’s sort of like a peer recognition.

“I think working in rural Nova Scotia and being a writer can be pretty isolating and so this is something where people will hear about my work … it’s a nice way to connect with a lot of people.”

Although she’s becoming better known in the Canadian literary world, thanks to a slew of nominations, the Westmount,

Cape Breton, native may be just as well known for her art.

She works in a variety of media including acrylic, egg tempera, mixed media, paintings and watercolour as well as in sculpture and textiles. Her subject matter tends to be of natural subjects such as trees and plants. She also designs and prints her own art books.

“I make a lot of artists books and so with those I can kind of be in charge of how they look and how they’re designed — the imagery, the text — so that’s one venue where I have control but often in the publishing realm, sometimes there is flexibility but sometimes, it’s just about the text so there isn’t much room for the visuals.”

Even so, she still managed to design the covers of her first and third books, Distillo and Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots.

Kavanagh has lived in various parts of Canada, sometimes moving for employment but she now works full time on her art in Canning. She doesn’t get back to Cape Breton as much now as she used to but that can be blamed on COVID-19 restrictions during the past two years. She used the time in lockdown to become further inspired and the resulting art will be released at a later date.

Kavanagh is currently working on a book of essays and there’s plans for another poetry book in the future.