More than forty years ago, French philosopher Felix Guattari said, “microscopic attempts of the community…play an absolutely crucial role,” this thinking has been the impetus behind my projects, which are often set within my community, or small spaces, and approached from a relational aesthetics perspective. Although a sense of belonging is ever more important in this mobile and digital age, connection and isolation are growing issues in our society and these themes emerge often in my work.

I tend to work with low-tech materials, tools, and techniques that I can  access easily. I typically focus on the experience and the doing of the project, favouring process over finished product. While I continue to work within the theme of connection, in the past two years my work has turned more to contemplating my interior landscape. This has led to new and ongoing projects where I have been engaging with new materials, techniques, and methods, including textiles, found objects, embroidery, and walking. These new materials and methods have led me to explore what it means to have an embodied practice and have amplified the element of repetition, or seriality, which occurs often in my work. Through repetition I am able to sit with a problem or a question over a long period of time (e.g. one year). Repetition has become a critical working methodology explicitly evident in my current project Fraser River Walks (2019-ongoing)–not yet shown anywhere. Through repetition and routine, survival becomes possible.

(Relational art: In Relational Aesthetics (2002), curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud defines this as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than independent and private space.”)

BIOGRAPHY

I am an interdisciplinary artist working with interventions, textiles, printed matter, and participatory installations. I graduated in Fine Arts (92) at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. My current work attempts to disrupt the everyday and to make connections with the public through planned and chance encounters. I have shown work in Vancouver at community galleries and artist run centres and most recently in Nova Scotia. Several of my projects have also occurred in the public space unaffiliated to a gallery or institution. I am currently working on a new body of textile-based work investigating the possibility of disruption within the craft of embroidery to explore the potential of the materials and techniques from a non-gendered lens.