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 evokes relationships that inhabit wilderness; not by static depictions of the natural world, but through investigating the kaleidoscopic possibilities of Nature’s entanglements with modernity. I explore how memory, capitalist accumulation and relationships in nature entangle to reflect networks of care and nurturing within my own personal life – as a mother to a young child, and a daughter caring for an elderly father with memory loss.

Inspired by the careful botanical works of Maria Sibylla Merian and the collage of Mary Delany, I create assemblages that I call materia symbiote. I appropriate capitalist detritus and non-sustainable waste to illuminate symbiotic relationships in nature, and how these intertwine with humanity’s dual fear and fascination of “the wild.” 

Enchantment is to fall under a rapturous spell of magical influences. However, as with words like magic, spell and glamour, its meaning has changed; limited to the discursive home of Hollywood, luxury goods and high fashion. I appropriate synthetic materials used in the commodification of enchantment, like microplastics, glitter and glitzy singles-use products to focus the viewer’s attention on the relationships between species– their jagged, sparkling edges catch the eye, creating occasions for stopping, noticing, and pondering. 

My overarching work explores re-enchanting the world through traditional practices that honor the sacred in nature and restore our connection with the land. I depict overlooked but integral microcosms of nature. The scenes paint the relationships between lichen, fungi, soil and insects and the human detritus that we leave as interlopers in the world of nature. These living pieces gesture towards the porous and on-going relationship between nature and humanity. My glistening worlds ask us to look, and look again, at the complex interactions of species, soil and psyche and to question and consider our human imprint.