I have a foot firmly planted in both the fine craft and art worlds. I am a painter. I am a glassblower, creating functional, decorative and sculptural works. I am a mixed media sculptor, working with clay and found objects. Much of my work grows out of my early experiences of growing up on a farm in rural Ontario.
As a painter, my subject matter at first may appear mundane, often exploring the landscapes around my home. I continue to return to certain places (houses, barns, fields) for inspiration. I have, perhaps, many paintings of the same place in different lights, seasons and configurations. They are places with which I have developed a particular intimacy through passing them time after time, and noting their slight and remarkable variations. Sometimes it becomes an obsession. The houses are like characters in a drama, the action made up by the changing seasons and the passing years. My other paintings are often detailed explorations of flora and fauna. Still life melons are cut open to reveal the fecund seed offerings inside. Bird studies and nests are lovingly rendered and often paired with samplings of textile patterns.
As a glassblower I incorporate the wild imaginings of fairy tales and children's stories
with the familiar rural fields and farmhouses in delicately enameled images hand-
painted within each piece. By creating mythologies out of my own experiences, familiar
figures stand beside exotic ones and there is a collapsing of the sublime and the
mundane.
Most recently I have been working sculpturally with clay, and creating found object sculptures (often using discarded wood and metal from the farm on which I used to live) combined with hand formed and glazed components.
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