Todd Gronsdahl
Artist · Maker · Storyteller
Todd Gronsdahl is a Saskatchewan artist whose work uses sculpture, installation, drawing, found materials and invented histories to explore how stories become accepted as truth. His practice combines practical making with humour, rural sensibility and a willingness to play with the historical record.
Knowledge & practice
What Todd carries
- 01
Sculpture & Object Making
Building physical objects through an intuitive, practical process — working through form, material, construction and experimentation rather than beginning with a completely resolved outcome.
- 02
Found & Vernacular Materials
Finding possibility in ordinary materials and familiar forms. Todd’s practice frequently repurposes found objects and vernacular construction methods, allowing the history already embedded in materials to become part of the work.
- 03
Storytelling Through Objects
Using physical objects as evidence of larger narratives. Sculptures become artifacts, prototypes or museum pieces that suggest characters, events and entire histories beyond the object itself.
- 04
Place & Saskatchewan
Drawing from Saskatchewan’s landscapes, waterways, communities, architecture and cultural mythology to create work that is inseparable from place. His long-running Saskatchewan Maritime Museum, for example, constructs an alternate provincial history around the wonderfully improbable premise of maritime Saskatchewan.
- 05
Truth, Fiction & History
Exploring how authority, archives and institutions influence what gets remembered as history — and using fiction, contradiction and humour to make those systems visible.
- 06
Creative Practice & Experimentation
Maintaining a practice built around curiosity, making and following ideas far enough to discover what they might become. Todd has also brought this into workshops and mentorship, including creative-practice and sculpture workshops and CARFAC mentorship.
Place
People
Practice
“Making is a way of thinking. You build the thing, follow where it leads, and sometimes discover the story only after your hands are already in it.”
— Todd Gronsdahl
About Todd
Building things, inventing histories, and finding truth somewhere between the two.
Todd’s work begins with making. Wood, found objects, natural materials and familiar forms become prototypes, artifacts and evidence from histories that never quite happened. The objects often look plausible enough to belong in a museum, workshop or forgotten Saskatchewan archive — until the story surrounding them begins to unravel. That tension is central to his practice. Todd uses humour and invention to question how histories are constructed, who gets to establish the official version of events, and how easily an object can lend authority to a story. But beneath the fictional museums and eccentric characters is a deeply practical relationship with making: learning materials, solving problems with your hands, repurposing what is available and allowing the act of building to lead somewhere unexpected.
Todd Gronsdahl is a visual artist and maker based in Saskatoon.