Dear Human is Jasna Sokolovic and Noel O’Connell, a collaborative studio based in Montreal, Canada. Partners in work and life, their collaboration balances between art and design and is rooted in their common interests in world craft traditions, sustainable making, and unconventional material (re)use.
Works created for Curatorial+Co. were influenced by handmade ways of recent past, ethnic textiles, tribal masks and the couple’s own product designs. The Standing Figure series uses a technique developed by Dear Human sculpting with a clay-paper mixture over armatures.
Before meeting at an artist residency in Denmark in 2008, Noel and Jasna lived varied lives in other worlds. Jasna grew up in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. When war broke out in the 1990s, her studies in architecture were interrupted and led to her immigration to Canada. There, she studied fine arts, graduating from Emily Carr University. Noel left his native United States during university to study art in Thailand and China. After several years, he returned to the US to finish his MFA at Rhode Island School of Design, with a focus on sculpture.