Covered Ground Exhibition
Landscapes and Lichen

December 2020 to August 2021
Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre

As an artist, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to capture the tactile connection I feel for the shield landscape of my hometown of Yellowknife: the rolling sea of ancient volcanic rock, innumerable crater lakes and scraggly Dr. Seuss trees. For me, it’s a landscape etched in lines, scars, memory and time. 
This body of work is deeply personal. Each painting is an emotional testament to my symbiotic relationship to the landscape.
As a child, when the chaos of the world overwhelmed me, my overly-anxious, self- sought refuge was amongst the outcrops, the higher places.  The shield was my sanctuary, providing solace and quiet. It was where I felt grounded, at home.  In the deep crevasses, the spiralling lichen patterns were portals to ethereal microcosmic worlds in which I explored. To me, they resembled maps, aerial views and solar systems of parallel universes. 
 As an experimental /mixed media artist, my newly-found encaustic work explores threshold states. Merging the literal and metaphorical, my paintings hover somewhere between pure abstraction and realistic landscape.
 
Lichens are harvesters of light. Light they convert into oxygen; the source of all life. They are resilient and self-sufficient, able to survive the harshest of conditions.
This work reflects my own resilience, an examination of my own environment and its impact on me.

Working through the dark winter, the pandemic and many hardships this past year, I’ve delved deep into my own darkness to excavate and unearth the light within me.