Northern familiarity

Rooted in the disciplinary traditions of Fine Arts, Geography, and Cultural Studies, this thesis seeks to understand how an understanding of melancholy and longing related to memories of one's familiar cultural landscape illuminates a place-based Francophone cultural identity. To understand the unique elements of northern Francophone Ontarian cultural landscapes and define northern familiarities, I pose the following questions. 1) What images of Sudbury's landscape are reflective of Francophone cultural identity? 2) Does juxtaposing Sudbury's cultural landscape images with images of an estranged location highlight the unique elements of Sudbury's cultural landscape? 3) Can place-based cultural identity be defined by visualizing the affects of longing, melancholy and stranger-ness when creating art-based research of Francophone Ontarian northerners from Sudbury. The creation of 3 large paintings accompanied by 100 postcards were exhibited in Sudbury and in Toronto in search of the answers to these questions.