After over a decade long career in business, and then a long hiatus dedicated to raising my three children, I went back to school and attended continuing studies courses at Red Deer College. Encouraged to do more with my art practice, I applied to OCADU and completed the BFA in 2019.
Having spent a lot of time outdoors as a youth canoe tripping at camp in the summers, working at our farm, visits to family in Ireland by the sea, and living for almost a decade in Alberta in a small town, all of this had a tremendous influence on my art. The work always starts with the natural world, I am inspired by plein air drawing, immersed using all of my senses, I respond to forms, colour and rhythm of these spaces.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Nature is a space where I draw and I have found has been a place for meditation. My latest body of work I have entitled the ' Embrace series'. Forms began to unfold combined together within a central space of the picture plane overlapping and intertwining, and some became circular. The final works felt like they were in a dance together, a great sense of movement and interplay, still with some opacity to indicate the ephemeral of these moments in time. There is a beauty to embracing self, and taking the next steps are exciting and rewarding in life, kind of like taking another step in a dance if you will. Therefore many of the titles relate to dance. The colours are much brighter as I was drawn to the brighter colours in the space perhaps since I was reflecting on the deeper emotions one feels when examining self.
Mr process involves analogue drawings plein air, colour studies, and transforming those works in digital where I layer, play wth opacity and interplay of forms. This combining of processes analogue and digital speaks to understanding our history and new ways of seeing, a new perspective perhaps.
The butterfly is my muse and i enter into the creative flow while drawing immersed in natures gardens their wings movements so intriguing the forms they create, and I get lost in the space and begin finding other unusual forms in the plant materials they are connected with for food and shelter. All is one. It is an intuitive dance of forms and bringing a bare essence of visual expression to these lived experiences both ephemeral and beautiful.
Overall I wish to evoke a sense of things changing and transforming, hoping to offer a meditative experience from which the viewer can draw their own thoughts and feelings from the work.