Aynsley Moorhouse
Aynsley Moorhouse is an artist and writer living in Toronto. She has an MFA in Acting from The New School and The Actors Studio in New York City, and an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Toronto. She is currently pursuing her Master of Social Work at the University of Toronto, in a collaborative program in Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care Across the Life Course.
While creating and presenting her own work, she co-facilitates a theatre group at the assisted living facility at Baycrest and is a member of a working group at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto on Aging, Old Age, Memory and Aesthetics. She has been a guest lecturer at U of T, has presented her work at academic conferences and arts festivals in Toronto and New York City, and has published articles in a number of academic journals. Her installation and accompanying artist statement, The Sounds of Forgetting, were published in Stanford University’s online journal Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities in May 2012.
Lately, her artistic practice has been focused on exploring dementia and its effects on identity, relationships, and meaningful engagement. As Angelo Murreda of the University of Toronto wrote in response to The Sounds of Forgetting, her work is “a phenomenological effort to recreate the embodied process of a mind in the active process of remembering and forgetting.”
Her piece Walk With Me was commissioned as part of the Rhubarb Festival at Buddies in Bad Times in February 2012, and a version of it was later commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art and CBC Radio for their joint residency program, Deep Wireless. It was presented at the Deep Wireless Festival and broadcast on CBC Radio One’s “Living Out Loud” in May 2012.
In February 2013 she presented her most recent sound piece and artist statement, Turning: Dementia and the Aging Body at Blackwood Gallery’s Running With Concepts: The Sonic Edition, and at Fordham University in New York City.
Her blog (see below) is a document of her Ontario Arts Council funded theatre program at the Apotex Nursing Home at Baycrest. It is a weekly view into the project as it grew and developed from the first rehearsal in March 2012 to the final performance in August 2012.
