Statement

My work evolves from an intimate connection to place and reflects a deep sense of discovering and knowing that place. During my formative years in Saskatoon, I was significantly influenced and taught by the Modernist Prairie artists of the day; my connection to fine art was through Saturday morning art classes at teh Mendel Art Gallery, visits to artist's studios, teachers who were practicing artists, poets, writers - each taught me to see, to record, to distill and interpret the land and space around me.

Venturing from the Prairies to Parsons School of Design in New York City at the age of 18, the urban landscape and the world opened up to me. Travel, study and work fostered a need to find oneself amidst the throngs of people, buildings and ideas. The drive to explore those ideas around me began to solidify in concepts of belonging as it is rooted in place or places personally and professionally. Isolation in a landscape or a city became a catalyst, an inspiration for me. It taught me to draw from personal strength and focused my abilities to learn, to express and to be. Place holding and belonging became my focus.

In my early years are an architect, the subject matter was the built environment, both interior and exterior space and how those spaces are sculpted to create a quietly visceral and personal expression for my clients. The relationship between our space and our persona(s) are presented to the world, how we are in the world, how we sit in the 'landscape'. So it came as no surprise that whether in Newfoundland, or New York City, India or Abu Dhabi, I continue to look for meaning and connection in my surroundings. Those visual conversations are the anchor to my creative practice, in my professional space, my studio and in my private space my home and garden. What I have distilled is a unique and very personal way of seeing that intentionally leaves space for others to see and feel and belong in my work.

Trained by artists and architects in design school, I was taught to see through a rigorous practice with personal and professional integrity - the clarity of concepts through technical understanding and explorations. The fundamentals of design taught me how to understand inherent qualities of form, shape, line, composition, proportion etc - from those principles I learned to create and shape with an evocative and even innovative outcomes that are driven by my technical understanding of materials. In my creative practice research, study and critical thinking reveal qualities that make up materials like raw Belgian linen's warp and weft, the grain of torrefied maple, the resilient properties of Tyvek - these under pinnings and my application of a carefully chosen medium, oil, acrylic, graphite, sumi inks work in concert to create a new contemporary work. My process and the conscious selection of materials and mediums creates subtle and delicate variations, playing on light and shadow, positive and negative, solid and void et al - each piece tells a story, a visual communication of place and belonging. The concepts reach beyond the rurality to a global scale of relationships to others and to the lands that we share and care for. It leaves space to contemplate, to remember and to belong.