Alisha Piercy is a Montréal-based author, artist and paintings conservator. Her practice ranges from bookworks to the writing of novellas, to in-situ performative drawing and raft installations. Her projects explore questions of alienation, psychological geographies, the fantasy of “being elsewhere,” and the tension between exile and freedom as it plays out in a diversity of islanded experiences. Her multi-disciplinary project You have hair like flags~(2010), a survivalist story, was inspired by the slogan Barcelona or Death! from a Senegalese pop song about the masses of young African men who attempt to float towards mainland Europe. The project included a novella, a thirty-day-long wall drawing performance in Montréal, and an installation of burning rafts set off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland.