Credits
Artist Statement for Please Hold (2026)
The linear march of time cannot be stopped, no matter how desperately we wish to stall it to preserve joyful memories. Time passing has forced me to leave behind many communities I loved, and now I fear the inescapable loneliness change brings me. Nearing graduation, I’ll face this again leaving my Creative Technologies community as we pursue our individual futures. Knowing my brain won’t flawlessly preserve my memories, I used my interdisciplinary skills in digital drawing, collage, graphic design, and storytelling to create a narrative-driven web-based scrapbook that immortalises this community and what it meant to me. My poetic narration and how I conceptualise time in this work draws inspiration from Jeanette Winterson’s Weight. My title, Please Hold, speaks to time and distance evoking phone calls, but most importantly, it’s an invitation. Help me hold these memories outside of time—they achieve immortality though every heart they touch.
This artwork is my capstone project for my Bachelor of Arts in Creative Techologies at the University of Regina.
Meet the author
Carmen Jerry (she/they/he) is a Canadian artist and graphic designer of Scandinavian and English descent, living and working in Regina, Saskatchewan. They are a student in their graduating year of a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Creative Technologies degree at the University of Regina. As a creative technologist, Carmen embraces interdisciplinary practices and the use of technologies for artistic purposes in her work.
Carmen’s visual art work primarily focuses on finding and exploring beauty and joy, and his digital storytelling leans into exploring the subversion of linear time. He is synaesthetic, seeing colour when he hears sound, and the creative use of colour guides her practice as she creates vibrant visuals and narratives meant to resonate with all the senses.
One of Carmen’s research interests is learning about trauma-informed and accessible graphic design for digital and print materials, and she is deeply passionate about including these principles in her work. He is always open to learning new information about best practices in this domain.
Carmen's digital storytelling artwork has been featured in PLAYGROUND, a 2025 exhibition of creative technologies projects at Regina's Fifith Parallel gallery, and her Augmented Reality artwork has been featured at Regina's FROST festival in February 2026.
Get in touch with me
Interested in taking a look at more of my artwork? My portfolio website can be accessed at: https://www.carmenjerry.com/
Looking to reach out to me directly? Feel free to email me at cej488@uregina.ca.
Works Cited/Image sources
I make extensive use of Neal Herbert's photo of the Milky Way (seen in several places on the title page, as well as once at the bottom of Chapter 2, Building Home). It can be found on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/80223459@N05/14577475589), or on Openverse:
"Castle Geyser & Milky Way" by YellowstoneNPS is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/?ref=openverse.
The image of the locket in Chapter 1, What's Home?, is courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Locket_MET_DP167072.jpg), and is also found on Openverse:
"<div class='fn'> Locket</div>" is marked with CC0 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en/?ref=openverse.
The image of the ocean used in the collage at the bottom of in Chapter 5, This is Home, is from Jess Loiterton on Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ocean-waves-crashing-on-shore-4784282/
The first image of me next to "Meet the Author" (where I am holding the Blahåj) on this page was taken by Sydney Coleman in November 2025.
Special thanks
Thank you to Dr. Charity Marsh and Professor Evie Johnny Ruddy for being such kind and supportive supervisors of our capstone cohort.
Thank you to the "True Survivors ⚔" groupchat and all the joy and chaos you've brought me these past four years. You're the heart of this piece. I love you.
Thank you to Lindsey French, who is the reason I became a Creative Technologies major, and thank you to every lovely person in the CTCH world who had a hand in helping me along.
Thank you to my mom and dad, for sending me encouragement, photos, muffins in the mail, reminders to fill out paperwork for taxes, and everything in between to help keep me going through this whole degree. I love you so much.
Thank you to my dorm neighbours for every joyful meal and late-night yap session that helped keep me sane, and thank you to my darling girlfriend who holds my heart in her hands and made an incredibly chaotic year and a half feel so much lighter.
Thank you to my grandma for generously lending me the white corded phone you see on the table where Please Hold is displayed at the showcase!
And thank YOU, reader, for being here and holding a piece of my soul like this. This project doesn't exist without you.
