
- City
- Kitchener
- Booth
- Nathan Phillips Square
Booth 375
Diana Bahr
Hi, I’m Diana — a mixed-media artist working primarily with encaustic (melted beeswax) and oil painting. I studied Drawing and Painting at OCAD University and later pursued Developmental Psychology and Education at the University of Toronto, deepening my interest in how we process memory and meaning.
My encaustic series, Traces, explores the invisible threads of intergenerational and ancestral memory. What do we inherit from those who came before us? And what traces of ourselves do we leave behind? I work with old family photographs, original drawings, and fragments of ephemera, embedding them in layers of wax that I fuse with a torch. As the wax solidifies, it preserves these images—yet it can also be carved back into, revealing what lies beneath. This tactile process of layering and excavation mirrors the way memory works: how it’s formed, revised, and retrieved over time.
Gold foil glints through many of the pieces, inspired by the black-and-gold mourning jewelry of the Victorian era. It serves as a way of honoring and preserving our familial histories.
