March 8th is International Women's Day, and 2016 is also the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote in Alberta. In celebration of these events, we have contacted artist Marlena Wyman.

Marlena Wyman is an Alberta artist that is a third generation prairie woman whose parents and grandparents farmed near Rockyford in southern Alberta, and has been creating art her entire life.

The inspiration for her latest exhibits was triggered while working as the audio-visual archivist for Alberta and finding that very few of the collections included women's stories. Wyman has researched and gathered photos, diaries and information about pioneer women that settled across the Canadian prairies, and has created beautiful works of art, that tell these stories.

The exhibit "Illuminating the Diary of Alda Dale Randall" is presently on display at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, which is very fitting, as this is where Wyman was inspired to create this theme. The family who is featured in this exhibit settled in a remote area of northern Alberta.

"This exhibit is truly a blending of archives and art. In my former work as an archivist, I found that one of the significant gaps in archival collections is that of women’s stories. In particular, the voice of early prairie women is largely excluded from mainstream history. As an artist, I honour these women’s considerable contributions, advocate for their rightful place in history, and encourage women to deposit their own and their foremothers’ records in archives," Wyman says.

This exhibit although based on diary excerpts from northern Alberta, depicts struggles that were shared across the prairies.

Another of Wyman's exhibits, The Sisterhood of Longing includes quotes from two pioneer women closer to our neighbourhood here in Southern Alberta. Barbara Alice Slater came to Stoppington, Alberta from Colchester England in January 1911, and Mabel Barker came to Shepard, Alberta from Ontario in 1891.

"The voices of early women settlers speak of loneliness and isolation, roughness and hardship, pride in work and new-found abilities, and the vastness and harshness of the prairie landscape. The sense of longing is a recurring theme in these women’s writings: longing for the home and family that they left behind, longing for the companionship of other women from whom they were separated by the vast distances of the prairies, and longing for the rights and freedoms that they were denied by the social structures and inequitable legislation of the time," Wyman says.

Both of these women came to Alberta before 1916 when the right to vote was finally granted.