By Andrew Maize in collaboration with El Jones, Seán Kennedy and Sue Goyette
April 26th 1-4pm – Dr. El Jones @ Halifax Common
May 2nd 1-4pm – Seán Kennedy @ Citadel Hill
May 3rd 1-4pm – Sue Goyette @ Point Pleasant Park
**Please note that exact time and location are subject to change according to weather and wind conditions. Rain-Wind Dates will be scheduled according to forecast/availability. Please refer to our website and social media accounts @mayworkskjipuktukhfx for the latest information.
We live in punishing and brutal times. Language plays a crucial role in how we make sense of the world. In language, we bear witness, negotiate meaning, and call-out the people and systems of power to hold them accountable. Language has long been a creative and powerful tool in labour and social justice movements, with the ability to encapsulate a movement or a Moment.
The arrival of May is the arrival of kite season. For Mayworks, Maize has invited 3 word-workers; El Jones, Seán Kennedy and Sue Goyette, to compose aerial text banners to be flown across the city. The Mayworks audience is invited to help fly these kite banners. By working collectively to lift language up into the sky – we embody a public discourse of sorts, fielding critical challenges and raising big questions.
RAISING BIG QUESTIONS is an ongoing project by Andrew Maize, that uses a home-made, modular kite-letter to write aerial text banners in the sky. Kite flying is a joyful, analogue and collective activity – one that must be responsive to both the weather and site. It is also an invitation to think about the role of language as something that both has a life of its own and as something that must be cared for and protected. Location of the events will be dependent on environmental factors, including wind direction.
Stay tuned closer to the date on the Mayworks Website and social media @mayworkskjipuktukhfx for announcements.
ANDREW MAIZE is an artist. His playful, collaborative and improvisational approach to making art is contingent on the relationships of environmental, social, and material situations. Recent collaborative explorations include mobile instruments for improvised performances, wind-powered kinetic sculptures, and experimental drawing practices (using local sourced inks and candle smoke). He seeks collaborations across disciplines to expand improvisational practices as tools for embodying more responsive and adaptable ways of being, by welcoming the fundamental agency of uncertainty. As an arts educator and organizer, he has been involved in collaborative projects that engage communities with art, in both traditional and non-traditional spaces. Maize graduated with a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax NS in 2012, and a MFA from the University of Guelph in 2021. He is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including SSHRCC, Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia.
DR. EL JONES. Author, poet, journalist, educator, and advocate. Dr. El Jones is all these things and more, an outspoken activist, thinker and writer whose strengths converge in her spoken word performances. A respected poet, Dr. Jones was two-time National Slam champion in 2007 and 2008, Poet Laureate of Halifax in 2013-2015, resident of the International Writing Program at University of Iowa in 2015, and poet in residence at University of Toronto Scarborough in 2021. What defines her achievements is a commitment to activism and community advocacy to highlight inequities and redress injustices. The recognition of her performances, teaching and political commitment testifies to the exceptional influence she has exercised during the Black Lives Matter movement and the expansion of Black scholarship in Canadian academia.
SUE GOYETTE lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and has published ten books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Future Howl, (Gaspereau Press, 2025). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed. Her work has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several awards including the Dalhousie University Teaching Award, 2021; the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation (Océan translated by Georgette Leblanc), 2020; J.M. Abraham Poetry Award 2016, 2012; ReLit Award 2016; 2014 Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award; 2013 National Magazine Award, Silver; 2012 Pat Lowther Award for Poetry; Bliss Carman Poetry Award, 2011; The Established Artist Recognition Award, NS, 2011; 2010 Earle Birney Award; 2008 CBC Literary Award for Poetry; as well as the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection, Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.
SEÁN KENNEDY is Professor of English and Coordinator of Irish Studies. Their research interests include Samuel Beckett, Queer Ireland, Ireland in Psychoanalysis, Zionism, and the “Erotics of Irish Austerity” (the ways in which austerity economics is troped in terms of the kinky language of discipline, control and humiliation). Publications include Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge UP, 2010), Send In the Clowns! (OR Books, 2025) and Beckett beyond the normal (in progress). Kennedy is the coordinator for Unsettling Irish Studies.
Event photo by John Haney
