Artist Statements

2020  Playhouse

This piece is a small, see-through playhouse that is suspended above and just out of reach of the audience. It represents the mourning of the loss of childhood uninhibitedness.

The small house mimics a child’s playhouse, designed to look and function like one of the toys that a child would play with. It was inspired by images of cottages and homes that could exist within a child’s storybook. The see-through light fabric conveys a sense of intangibility, of something outside of reality.

It is designed to stimulate vicarious nostalgia or remembrances of your own past, as well as triggering the elements of one’s own imagination. In that moment of reflective creation you are drawn out of your present physical space and into a contemplative state of past memories, the potential to fantasize and create new ones.

You then might become aware that you are never physically able to return to a past state of memory and those fragmented memories are the only things which remain. The house is empty and out of reach of the audience in order to emphasize the reality that what you’re experiencing is only in your mind. This ghostly house represents the loss of something that you will never get back, something that is lost in time. All that remains is what we can remember or imagine.


2019   Does This Sentence Make Sense ?

In my Intermedia practice, I’m interested in exploring the different facets of dealing and working with a learning disability. With this project I want to focus on the balance of burden and comfort within the physical and mental struggle. My performance includes a wearable piece and will present the opportunity for the audience to observe this balance.

The difficulties of my learning disability is represented by the sand. The unachieved small and basic processes of learning become, grain by grain, an overwhelming and constant weight. Managing these struggles has been done by slowing down, isolating, compartmentalizing and dealing with each individual obstacle. The wearable represents the management of the struggles. The sand is compartmentalized into channels throughout the area of the piece. When it is worn, one feels the weight as burdensome and awkward but the distribution of it makes it manageable and to some degree comforting. This comfort, when experienced, reflects my acceptance of who I am and the management of my abilities and limitations as they grow and evolve.

I chose to use velvet for a couple of reasons. Velvet is worn by royalty and is a symbol of elevation in status and privilege which is reflected in our value of education in society. According to colour psychology, royal blue represents security and success in society while the dark green represents sustainable growth and the teal represents communication. Velvet is also a very soft and pleasurable material, at the opposite end of the spectrum from sand. Despite this, they work well together. This is another metaphor of the balance achieved between comfort and burden. The location of the sand on the wearable is significant. The channels of sand are distributed to the points on the body that carry and deal with physical and mental stress such as the neck, shoulders, back and head. I’ve also incorporated areas in the piece where the sand is accessible with the intention of reducing the burdensome weight while using it to express my thoughts with others.

Along with the wearable, I’ve built a free-standing, six foot tall wooden frame that represents a sheet of full staff lined and margined paper. During the performance I pour the sand onto the lines of wood, creating different sized and shaped piles that mimics the act of writing letters and words on paper. This shows my attempt to use the bits of information that I am carrying to construct sentences in order to share the knowledge that I have gained and possess. Though I know what I’m trying to communicate, my written form is often not understood by the reader.

2019  The Abandon

 In this painting series, I am interested in working with and exploring the idea of the passage of time and its effect on spaces and materials. I also want to express an awareness of a personal relationship that we have with those effects of time. 

I spent my early years growing up in the small rural mining town of Grande Cache.  Here I witnessed, through the ups and downs of the economy, the results of abandoned homes.  While occupied houses maintained a sense of not ageing, the boarded up building next door deteriorated and seemed to age rapidly. I became aware that a balance between an active living space and its decay is affected by the presence and maintenance of its human occupants. Time creates decay.  We as humans have control over the rate of decay and when we are no longer present it goes unchecked. Nature will always reclaim its own. I’m choosing to explore this phenomenon by focusing on old, abandoned domestic living spaces where evidence of decay and the patina of time are dominant.

I ventured out on an expedition to known rural Alberta ghost towns, to gather source material from old abandoned buildings to witness times transformation.  I also sourced found photographs of these forgotten towns. I discovered something very powerful in the fact that there was evidence of occupancy and sudden abandonment.

In the painting process, I began by pigmenting water, applying it to a canvas and allowing a duration of time and evaporation to stain the surface. This process will mimic the effects of time that are happening within the environment of the subject matter.  I negotiated between the resulting stains and my application of paint, creating a resolution to best interpret the balance revealed by the passage of time. The result is an eerie awareness that the ravages of time are always present, even in our own sanctuaries. I acknowledge that there exists a pattern of life and decay which is determined by the economy that we live in. The potential for more abandoned homes and towns is always there unless we intervene.

I have also taken inspiration from the cinematography and colour story of the movie Blade Runner, 1982. I am choosing to do this because it’s referenced to a dystopian future that for the audience it is an old movie that is a past production of what was supposed to have happened in the year 2019. I like the idea of playing with the idea of time while working with a concert that is focusing on the passing of linear time.


2019  Looking Up the North. Looking For Rain

I want to explore a disruption of an automatic flow and that awkwardness that comes with the reaction of the sound after that disruption takes place. For this performance I chose to walk across and around the four corners of a crosswalk intersection. At each of the four sections I planned to stop in the same spot at each rotation and look up at the sky, while facing my body North where wildfires are causing a major threat to communities. I did this 13 times. To represent the number of days my cousins have been evacuated from their homes in HighLevel, Alberta.What happens next is up to the people around me. My action might stop the flow of the people walking beside, behind and infront of me. And the simple curiosity to look and see what I am looking at. I want to explore a person’s curiosity and wonderment of the question of why and what I am looking at. I want, just for a moment, to have their attention and to hold it just for a moment and then let them continue on with their own flow. When it came to the clothing, I chose an outfit that I would stand out in, as well as promote an element of safety. If I would do this performance again, I would choose to not wear the safety vest but instead a bright raincoat in addition to the umbrella I already wore. For a moment I want them to question why. I want to have their attention and their curiosity. Disrupting their flow while presenting a moment of curiosity. Is this disruption the beginning of making a bigger change in one’s life. It’s the beginning of the opportunity to take notice in something much bigger than oneself. But without that sliver of disruption and wonderment, the bigger question of how can we stop, how can we change, might never come. What is going on with the fires up north is much bigger than one person can fathom. However, as long as we start to look at the bigger picture and start asking the right questions and seek the right answer, we can begin to change things. My goal today was to explore that beginning moment, just that fragment of that first thought and action that might come along with it. I, myself am feeling very small and helpless. Therefore, I wanted to create a performance that may or may not have created a ripple. A build up of energy and power thoughts that I could send to my loved ones up north.

In my family, we believe in the power of prayers. And at 4:30 this afternoon my cousin let me know that it rained just a little where she was. As she and her family live in High Level were evacuated 13 days ago and have not been able to go home since that was the reason I walked 13 times around that intersection. I wanted to show my love and support.


2019  53°29′49″ N  113°33’21″ W

For this project, I began looking at the idea and meaning of seclusion. I wanted to explore the concept and idea of a relationship between a human (myself) and the space that was still uninhabited and unclaimed by someone. Seclusion can happen when a person chooses to spend time outside and away from a bigger population of people. They choose to find this space and carve out their own area and call it their own. What I wanted to show was how the environment naturally reacts to this intervention. Then after a time lapse, you could see a visible difference in the growth and changing of the environment. I wanted to work with this idea and the potential relationship with the environment. I was aware that I did not ask the environment or nature itself to erase my claimed space within this wild and unpredictable forest. As time went on, I realized that the space and the environment did not ask me permission to take back the space that I made for myself. 

 I set out and found a space within a group of trees. I began by searching for a place where tall grass and weeds had taken over the landscape. Once I found the spot, I set up a hunting and wildlife Tac camera. I cut out a space that was 66” by 66”. This was a square that was measured out to fit my body lying down. To indicate these lines/barriers I hammered in four pegs and marked them out with some plastic rope. I then physically revisited the secluded spot every second day for the next 25 days to change out the memory cards in the Tac camera. I then took thousands of photos and compiled them into a time lapse video. 

 The second part to this project reflects my conclusion as to how I wanted to end my interaction with the space. I chose to record a video of me walking through the path that led to the spot. I also created an audio description and direction to pair with the video.  Whoever watched the video would then be able to follow along with me and my experience while simultaneously being able to create their own experience. I wanted there to be a comparison and a realization of how much growth and change happened while I inhabited the space. 

I was surprised because my overall expectation of how the experiment would end did not happen. In the beginning I thought I would come in to the secluded space and cut the grass and manipulate the ground and then simply watch nature quietly and slowly return back to its former state. The changes I marked would be dissolved. What I didn’t expect was how unapologetic the environment was to how it was going to take the space back.  A little animal interacted with the space in this past week. I was not able to capture this animal on camera due to many unforeseeable problems with the camera itself. The creature came into the space and tore apart the plastic rope and literally took down the barriers that I created. It also took one of the pegs that I had set in the ground. I was expecting my final steps to be winding up the rope and taking the pegs out of the ground, then removing the camera from the tree. This intervention would have been how I chose to end the experiment. However, instead, I ended up picking up what pieces I could find of the rope and then taking just two of the pegs home with me. This process of me giving back the land that I took never happen, instead the land took itself from me. 

 I find myself not upset by this result but instead I am more in awe of the literal power and persistence that nature and the plants had towards my invasion. 

After this project I find myself still letting what happened sink in and I feel like I am still processing the conclusion. I am looking forward to future projects and further exploring my relationship with the environment. I feel like there is much more to be explored.


2019  RED CHECKMARK OR X

For this performance I wanted to explore privilege of education and how as a child I felt the Pressure to keep up with my fellow classmates and to be grateful for the opportunity to learn while discovering I had a learning disability. 

For this 45 performance I have chosen to sit in a small child’s desk while with a red ballpoint pen, carve into the desk eat her a checkmark or X.  Each make represented a each month that I was in school. Chronologically starting with the first grade I indicated if it was a good month and or bad month. Going year by ear for the 45 mins.

I chose to have the performance take place in a classroom room with desk. I placed the child desk at the front of the classroom. I wanted to take the place of the teacher. This was because I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on my earlier education experience as I am adult now. Indicating with the the position of the desk and the red pen. But I also chose to to wear jeans and a t shirt with runners and I chose to sit in the small desk because I wanted to bring myself back to that point in My life. To try and presses it as an adult.


2019  The Stuffy Coat

I have created a fur coat, which is made up of the skins from stuffed animals. Made from a combination of different types of teddy bears, and other animals such as bunny, ducks, koalas, moles, lions and different kinds of Beanie babies. I deconstructed each plushy but cutting or ripping out the stitches, pulling the stuffing and plastic beads out of the body cavity and cutting out the nose and each of the eyes. I then laid out and then placed together each fur to create a pattern that consisted of haft the coat being made out of colorful pelts, and the other half made out of the transitional and natural colour you would see on a live animal. I chose to do this because I wanted to show( whether the fur was real or not) the difference between what a average fur coat would look like vs the fun and colourful version that I came up with. I wanted to comment and compare the difference between the mutilating and changing of an animal’s body so that we can wear, poses and own the animals pelt, verses the same actions being done to an object from our childhood that we would have loved and cared for just as some of us do for our pets and live animals. I then cut out a pattern for the sleeve, hood and torso out of a liner of one of my older coats. I then hand stitched and sewed together all of the pelts to create it. I also attached the liner so that it could function as a wearable coat.

I chose to work with Beanie Babies because of their rich history, they are considered collectible. And the act of buying, selling and collecting is a practice that is performed by maily adults, most child could not afford the price of the some of more valuable Beanie Babies, some witch go for thousands of Dollars online.

I am interested in working with the idea of taking something innocent from our childhood, that one would have to let go of when

in the process of growing up, and then taking that idea/object and then manipulating and or changing it so that it becomes something that an adult would had to deal with, and its problems and consequences that would be the result of that act or thought pattern.


2018   Latitude: 53.876922 Longitude: 119.130256 Altitude: 199 meters,

It is 25 inches x 20 inches, Wearable Sculpture. Based on the concept of a place that gives me a sense of comfort and safety. The forest behind my home in Grande Cache, Alberta, is where I gathered moss from the forest floor. I used this moss, green yarn and blue velvet on the underside to represent place and feelings of comfort which are my response to a hug. I casted my shoulders, creating a sculptural landscape which can only be worn comfortably by me. I experience a sense of peace when the sculpture is wrapped around my shoulders. The result is a sculpture that is cave like but also reflects back on the mountains of my home town.

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