Barbara Gilbert is an illustrator with an MFA and a BFA from Concordia University, who now lives in Toronto. She has had solo exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal. For the McCleave tour she will create a book that retells the children’s lullaby ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ in text and slightly dark, macabre drawings. The work will deal both with nursery rhymes and how they inculcate dominant ideology, and will create a fictional narrative of infanticide based on the story of the artist’s own grandmother, a woman who lived in poverty with nine children in rural Quebec.

Left to right:

Abduction, Precipice and Ghosts.
Barbara Gilbert (2005)