4/12/25

My recent work explores themes of growth and decay. I am interested in visual systems that expand and contract. Employing natural and fantastical motifs, I am developing my own formal language to explore my perception of our shared social and ecological landscape. Inspired by my life in rural Canada, my current body of work is about existing on a landscape in which growth and decay are intimately linked through land use/relation.

The material quality of the work is familiar. I use primarily ink and paint, yet the images sit uneasy. Swirling, tense, and at times almost collapsing in on themselves. I am trying to activate negative space with my mark-making, attempting to make a furious and awkward image that hovers between our world and another. Depicting the tension of life/death is integral to my work and is expressed through my symbology of stumps, fungi, grain, alpine flowers, berries, trees, and horse-skulls. In this way, the industrial, pastoral, and romantic realities of rural life are the present in my work. I am informed by life on farms, logging sites, anarchist farms and outsider communities. 

In my painting practice, layering is essential and reflects my interest in things that grow and the processes of decay that deconstruct them. I work the whole canvas, following the initial impetus to its conclusion. I rarely plan work and let the image form through the process.

The act of mark-making is a catharsis for me. The effort of growing an image from nothing and then wringing as much from it as I can is a way for me to think. My process is heavily intuitive with very little planning. This approach to mark-making leads to exerting the materiality of the medium to its extent. Finding the image through digging, burrowing into it.  I enjoy letting my lines grow to their maximum reach, to curl and distort and burrow into established forms. Layer after layer building on itself and ultimately disappearing. I build the subject up, line after line, form after form, and then limit the growth by covering up days of work with solid blocking colour. In this way, I think of mark-making like tying knots. It is a process of packaging disparate parts, of containing movement/energy and of sublimating the energy  that went into its creation.

The tension between growth and decay is central to life in BC where I work and live. Living in a rural environment means a close proximity with the natural world and a front seat to the violent collision of nature and culture. The role of rural places as a source of raw material/capita to sustain cities as metropolitan centers. In this way, the background of my work will always be the ‘hinterland,’ the place far from the center.