Smooth co-operator

>> Eco-worker, film fest organizer,
artist and illustrator Aimée Van
Drimmelen keeps it real

ONE REEL DAME: Van Drimmelen

by MATTHEW WOODLEY

In 2000, Aimée Van Drimmelen made it as far as the new employee orientation and team-building event at the Regina Home Depot. Which was about enough to make her move to Montreal.

Not that she has a problem with home improvement. Seven years later, Van Drimmelen works at NDG’s Coop La Maison Verte, doling out ecological household products, organic foodstuffs, fair-trade coffee and various other good vibes. “I do their communications, the Web site and mop the floor,” she adds.

And not that she has a problem with Saskatchewan either. “Even though I live in Mile-End now, NDG keeps me connected to reality,” she says. “People hang out in their sweatpants. It reminds me of home.”

So if there’s a singular driving force behind all the things Van Drimmelen does, it’s the same kind of community mindedness you’ll find at the Coop. And more and more, the vehicle is art. “A few years back, I found myself working three jobs while going to school and just thinking about what I like to do, and it just slapped me in the face: ‘Why am I not doing this? Why am I holding back?’”

So with not an art, but an anthropology degree under her belt, Van Drimmelen started exploiting her inherent abilities to bring people together and to make things that look good. Exhibit A: the Reel Dames Festival, an annual March evening of Super8 films made by women that she co-organizes with pal Hosay Breau. “We just put out the word, ‘Hey ladies, want a showcase for your work?” she says. “We got a ton of responses and a really broad range of work from cliché to crazy creative. It’s been amazing—we’ve packed the Sala Rossa every year and it seems to get bigger and bigger.”

Then there’s her growing portfolio of personal visual work (www.fortpolio.net for samples). Somewhere along the way, Van Drimmelen stumbled upon the potential of drum skins—the blank, front faces on bass drums in particular. If you haven’t seen one at a rock show, she’ll be showing a batch upstairs from Eva B during this February’s Nuit Blanche. She’s also working on a series of prairie paintings. “I keep thinking about the tar sand mining and all of the ugly stuff that’s going on with the oil industry underground and the contrast with the absolute beauty up on the surface.”

Meanwhile, Van Drimmelen (who also plays a mean blues harmonica) has been working her way into the world of editorial illustration, channelling her collected experience as a writer and editor into the visual, and sometimes political realm. Among others, Walrus magazine recently published one of her pieces. “I’ve been doing it for a couple years, but I still feel like I’m developing my style,” she says. “The biggest challenge is how to say something and not be cheesy. I want to make stuff that editors can’t refuse.”