Bio

I was well-travelled by the age of 13 having grown up in Indonesia, Lebanon, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, the United States and Austria.  All of these cultural juxtapositions helped me develop a multi-discipline approach to making art.  There is a certain freedom in knowing that there is no ‘correct’ way to be in this world.  It allows ‘meaning’ to be a very fluid concept.

My love of maps seems to be shared by many as the Illustrations have been featured in articles around the world and in many different languages – most prominently within Huffington Post and the Design Magazine Core77.  The maps were on display at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2010 and at Chicago’s SmArt Gallery in 2010 and 2011.  The maps are both profound and meaningless and reflect perfectly my belief that human existence is also profound and meaningless.  Maps are very clinical, serious tools that exhibit the human need to control and possess the land on which human’s depend as well as being personal diaries of ancestry, memories and hopes.  I take this familiar tool and spin it until I find arbitrary, dis/figurative fairy tales by pulling focus between the intersecting lines and shapes of these maps.  This play between control, whimsy and personal meaning is what gives these maps their power.

The MotherHood Experience received funding from the Ontario Arts Council Northern Arts Grant towards my Mother’s Day Opening in 2011.  I continue to use familiar objects such as bottles, pans, lingerie, vases and cutlery to explore the meaning of Motherhood in our western culture.  This body of work was recently presented at the 14th Annual International Motherhood Conference in Toronto this fall of 2011.   This growing body of conceptual MotherHood art has been invited back for the 15th Annual Motherhood Conference in 2012.

In September of 2012 my newest body of work on X-rays will be presented at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids Michigan from September 19th to October 7th.  Whereas the maps were about lines, the X-rays are more about shapes and colour-fields.  In keeping with the maps, the X-rays are another common human tool, (going the way of the dinosaur and the dodo), that just needs a little tweeking to be seen in a new light.  I am furthering my work on lines and shapes into planes with a growing body of work in which I weave on dead trees in the woods.  As the branches twist and undulate, the woven plane torques.  Multiple planes in themselves begin to create forms/spaces/rooms within the dead and fallen trees.  Although my mediums keep changing, I do believe that it is one long meditation on The Line.

It is important for me to also be an active member of the vibrant Sault Ste. Marie arts scene.  I have been commissioned by Mocking Bird Hill Farms to create a sculpture in the woods for 2012 using bio-degradable materials.  Teaching after-school art classes to kids as well as volunteering at the Senior Centre teaching printmaking and felting workshops is incredibly inspirational.  I have also partnered with the Sault Youth Association (SYA) in their “Fresh Art” initiative by hosting plaster/moldmaking and felting workshops in my studio.  I currently sit on the Board for the Arts Council of SSM & Area.

Before settling into the world of visual arts I worked on independent and commercial films for five years in Toronto and Vancouver after graduating from Queen’s University’s Film Department.  The short film “The Bus Stop” was accepted to the Bilbao International Film Festival in 1997.  I decided to switch my focus to fine arts in 1998 and attended Massachusetts College of Art for Sculpture.  With my children now in school full time I am back in the studio creating art.