Studio Practice

In the late 1980s, I relocated to the West Coast from the Canadian prairies and my first body of work was a visual Requiem for the forests of the West Coast, a tree/torso installation that explored the interconnectedness between ecosystem and human thriving. What followed was a sustained visual investigation into embodiment and liminality, and a PhD that proposed art-making as an active practice (requiring self emptying), a process of inquiry through which we come to understanding, an apophatic epistemological small humble gesture.

My current series of multimedia panels seeks to understand, through the active practice of making, how human/ocean interactions and metaphors might make and complicate meaning in this present day. By juxtaposing minimal planes of material with bodies balancing on the brink of losing balance–embodied encounters caught between fear and joy working with and against gravity– this work asks how mundane surfaces, sounds and skins unfold and collide to create meaning.