Artist Statement

Once I brought an acorn into my studio, a few minutes later I noticed a tiny white Acorn Weevil larva emerging from a newly created hole. I researched the creature, then walked fifteen minutes uphill to Mount Royal park to find an oak tree. I let the weevil out and it buried itself in the soil by the oak’s roots. It will hibernate undersoil for two years, then emerge to eat the leaves of the oak. These types of restorative acts are central to my practice; the art of noticing, overlooked entanglements, care and compassion as a starting point for encountering the other.

My practice is rooted in careful observation; I believe drawing from life is uniquely suited to create dialogues with more than human worlds. My work draws from the still life genre of sottobosco – forest floor paintings. Born from the invention of the microscope; these painting illustrated a world grappling to understand nature, mortality, spirituality and its place within it. Considering similar questions, I explore the strange and overlooked entanglements between animals and their host plants, fungi, and soil, the supposed finality of knowledge this scientific viewpoint presents, and human anxiety relating to notions of “the wild.”