More than 20 years after the last residential school closed in Saskatchewan, one artist is channeling the pain inflicted by the schools into pieces of art.

“It’s these kinds of conversations that are hard for people,” Holly Yuzicapi said.

She told the assembled students of the damage that residential schools wrought on Indigenous culture and on her own family.

Yuzicapi is an artist and she is helping students from both Balcarres Community School and Vibank School complete art projects dedicated to the damage of residential schools. There will be 94 projects when completed, one for each recommendation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Yuzicapi said the project was designed to help preserve the First Nations culture that was suppressed through the residential school system. She hopes it will rekindle the culture and foster new understandings of the culture for the students taking part, who are made up of different ethnicities.

“[Former Chief of the Assembly of First Nations] George Erasmus talks about how, when common memory is lacking, there can be no sense of community. So this is a whole experience for all of them and I hope they hold on to it,” she said.

The projects fuse traditional techniques and materials, like quills and leather, with canvas and photoshop.

Jacob Stoll is one of the students taking part. His project has a black and white photo of a lone priest walking in front of Lebret Residential School. The words of apology, issued by the Catholic Church, are superimposed over top.

“It's a lot to think about,” Stoll said.

“[To think about] just the past and how we don't want that to happen again. And just always making sure that everyone knows about what happened, because there's still a lot of people that don't [know]."

The last residential school closed in 1996, nearly a decade before many of these high schoolers were born.

"We really need to close that gap between our different religions, especially with newer ones coming into play” said Grade 10 student Pele Inanani.

“It's OK to do your religious ceremonies and accept others the way they are."

Julie Englort worked on a project with a judge’s gavel and an Indigenous feather made of beads. The gavel and feather were weighed against each other on a scale at equal height.

“I hope people take away that it's not just about Western law,” Englort told CTV News.

“I hope they realize that First Nations have their own culture and their own system of dealing with things. I hope that people understand that we're not stuck in our ways. [Our ways] need to change.”

Many of the projects are not yet completed. They will be unveiled to the community at a special show in April.

Yuzicapi hopes that the lessons learned by the students will spread. She described the process of learning about the residential schools and reconciliation as a “process [the students] can apply to their lives, not just with their friends but with other people they come across.”

This is the eighth year that projects like this have been undertaken at the Balcarres school. Yuzicapi’s guidance and materials were provided through a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

The school plans on having more projects to create advocates as well as artists.