b.1980 (Clearwater, BC Canada)

I came back to painting five years ago, after the daily rhythms of motherhood, retail management, and the chaos of keeping everything running. When I returned to the studio it was not because I had something to say. It was because I had questions I could not answer.

The questions were about my journey and the women in my family. My Nan, my Grama, my Mom. Women who ran businesses, raised families, and managed households, all at a time when the world had very clear ideas about women’s roles. They moved through it all as though it simply was. No announcement. No apology. And they shaped so much of my path before I had any idea it was happening.

I am still uncovering how. That is what the paintings are for. Not to arrive at an answer but to keep looking clearly at something that matters. Each time I collage together old family photographs, prepare a wood panel, and begin building up thin layers of buttery smooth oil paint, I am trying to see these women more fully. To understand what they carried and what they passed on without knowing they were passing it on.

The wood panels I paint on connect me to the place I come from, the woods and mountains. The geometric forms are the rules, visible to begin figuring out how to move within and through them. The flowers stand in for the women themselves, each bloom a specific person, a specific life that exceeded what was expected of it.

My art is the story of a woman searching, observing, and still reconciling the different parts of herself.