Violet Costello (MFA Sculpture, Concordia University), has received awards from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, British Columbia Culture, and Canada Council. Her works in painting, sculpture and installation are often comical, but also raise questions about the formation and meaning of cultural identities and stereotypes. She is interested in the complexities of the human condition and inspired by the child’s world of play, where reality readily gives way to the imagination. Her painting series, Bringing Home Baby, depicts newborns being confronted by the intensely detailed culture of the family home. The absurd, dreamlike quality of these homes evokes the strangeness of these new worlds for the babies, and is suggestive of the complex processes by which culture defines and imposes the identity that will shape a baby’s life. The series follows on her sculptural work, Newborns/Swaddled, which depicts babies still isolated from impending cultural traditions.