Artist Statement

I explore how we perform sensory experiences of ordinary spaces, conveying how this can be seen and even more so felt. I trace the lines between people, boundaries, and place; blending notions of narratives, myth, collective histories, personal experience, time, knowledge, cultural expressions, truths, and fictions. Using the body and geography as sites to investigate personal, conceptual, and social boundaries, I question why they exist, and why it is important to transgress them through creating environments that explore concepts of thresholds, and attempt to make works that approach intimacy, and evoke psychological states within my drawings, sounds, sculptures, installations, and lived practice.

Space is felt.  It is experienced.  Acting as a forum for knowledge, we attempt to order space as an extension of ourselves.  We make it ours.  In turn we become part of that space, projecting ourselves within and upon it. I have been intrigued by how the body and ritual associated with the body hold significant cultural meaning, question identity, and mediate our subjective experiences of place.

My work extends towards examining relationships between land, space, people, and spirit, which has been compelled by being raised in the Northern culture of Canada's Eastern and Western arctic, and is analogous to holistic ways of seeing the world. I attempt to engage with place as an active metaphysical collaborator, through the materials I borrow, the environment I respond to, and the ethical considerations my practice follows.  I seek to uncover how artistic intervention can reveal what larger society renders imperceptible, and my practice posits the role of artists towards contributing to expressions and communication of embedded ‘intangible’ knowledge, through creating environments that exist within thresholds.

My practice is concerned with connectivity. Working in fragments, and various mediums (sculptures, drawing, sound, textiles), then curating and re-making experiences, in attempts to find new meaning, patterns of conflict and accord to investigate how we might make sense and explore complexity in our experiences and relationships. This multi-layered stratum blends these notions and draws upon kinship with local and place-based knowledge and cultural expressions, to locate continuum and plurality, rather then a polarity.