My work shows, for me, what it is like to live in a body (rather than what a body looks like). I focus on body fragilities, temporality, ambiguity, awkward moments and corporeality.
The works are poetic self-portraits, but aren’t merely inward-looking. I intend to provoke the viewer’s own body awareness as they experience the imagery: the work can enter a kind of wordless conversation with the viewer.
Lately I’ve been focusing on mixed media abstract figure sculptures mainly made of cardboard pulled out of the recycling dumpster at the studio building. Other materials often employed are needle felted wool, fabric, fibre glass, epoxy resin and salvaged metal. The sculptures are informed by two powerful female artists, Maria Lassnig who made what she called “body-awareness” paintings and Loïe Fuller who was a patent-holding inventor in the 19th century whose dance, filmed by the Lumière Brothers in 1896, infuses the abstract figures of my work.
As a poet and a printer of letterpress books of my own writing, I relate to the sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems. I intend my work to do what sculptures often do, which is to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or extra-verbal, embodied, subliminal conversation between sculpture and viewer.
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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.