ARTIST STATEMENT

I grew up in the suburban town of Tsawwassen, BC. When I was a kid, I equally romanticized the city and the countryside. The city was a symbol of humanity’s awesome inventiveness. The countryside was wild and unspoiled. These landscapes were laden with fear and excitement for me, and each invited thoughts of travel. I pored over atlases and made pen-pals in the Caribbean. I wanted so badly to know what the world would look like from the window of an airplane.

At 19, I traveled overland across Asia with a friend. I saw desert mountains strewn with thousands of prayer flags, and marble mining towns so dusty, they looked to be under snow. I saved money for that trip by planting trees in Northern BC on a cut block large enough to be seen from outer space. Traveling made me appreciate the diversity of landforms on Earth. It made me think about the ways in which we humans restructure the land to serve our way of life, and how nature in turn restructures us, and our creations.

Every building comes from a hole in the ground, and I want to show the hole and the mass together. I want to show forces of construction and destruction in the same picture. I want to show that we are part of nature and not separate from it. I want to show that land is bodily, that rivers and streams are circulatory systems, and damming a river is a violent act.

Painting is a forum that allows me to excavate, build up, burn down and rearrange space. The canvas is like a construction site, a garden, a sandbox–it changes much over time. The world I paint is mercurial, and it is not a world I completely understand. It is a world of mountains, pits, rivers, wells, gullies and ghost towns. I paint from an alien’s perspective, hovering above the land. I think about what the world looks like now, and what it will look like in a thousand years. What happens to our cities when resources are exhausted? What do we make of a landscape full of human intention but empty of human presence?