My work is an embrace— at its essence, a short-lived, direct moment of contact between a material and a surface. Plate to print, mold to cast, my work indulges in incised textures found within the natural and built environments to record unique impressions of impermanent places.
As a child, the daughter of mountaineers, I traced the alpine landscape of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta with my feet— traversing summits, glaciers, moraines and rock faces. My approach to art-making mimics this direct, tactile and exploratory interaction with site. I see the world as a monumental printmaking plate—a series of scribed surfaces (or matrices) with the potential to be recorded, reimagined and recontextualized through the arts. Previous artworks have utilized a range of sites, including historic building facades (Shroud: The Macara-Barnstead Building), high-arctic icebergs (Swell), and the intimate negative space created by clasped hands (The Space between Held Hands). Despite being varied, these sites are rich with found marks and textures, each unique and identifiable like a fingerprint.
Influenced by the Conceptual Art and Land Art movements of the 1960 and 70’s— my work is project-specific with the format changing to best respond to the formal and conceptual needs of individual artwork. It is through the marriage of material and process that content and meaning are formed. My work speaks through the intersection of disciplines— combining the evocative language and ritualistic process of printmaking with the materiality and site-specific capabilities of sculpture.
Often, my backpack becomes a portable studio— packed with brayers, ink, paper, alginate or latex for site-based creations. This peripatetic practice unites my childhood wilderness adventures with my love for direct, in situ working methods. In the studio, I subscribe to the practice Twyla Tharp calls ‘scratching‘ an active search for ideas and an indulgence in exploration. My studio is full of samples and playful deviations, which serve as placeholders for ideas yet to be explored, often taking years to surface.
I see art as a tool for building connection, compassion and empathy between people, places and experiences. I am often humbled by the unique affordance of art for its ability to transcend language barriers and offer a shared, universal expression. I feel my work is most fully realized when it creates moments of shared magic and self-discovery for the viewer.