I’ve learned to live with a head full of bees but these days it’s all about wasps.
​
So. Many. Wasps. Wasps that retreated indoors last week after the pest-control guy shot up the kitchen fan vent with a killer powder. Wasps that just wouldn’t stay away even after two pest-control guys came back to deal with the discovery of an impressive-sized nest metastasizing inside the wall. I spent most of the week whacking at wasps and sucking them up in the hand-held vacuum cleaner. Whacking and sucking, whacking and sucking.
It’s not the sight of a single curled-up carcass that gives me the willies; it’s the sheer volume of them. A ladybug on my forearm might prompt that little rhyme, Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children are burned… Wait, what is that all about? My point is, if a cloud of ladybugs landed on my arm I would be screaming like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Hitchcock knew all about the power of numbers to turn bird-friendly movie-goers into ornithophobes.

A large mass of harmless insects doesn’t even need to touch me to get my skin crawling, like the summer when I watched my mother slap at a few flying ants on the window with her fly-swatter while behind her a black mass of hatchlings oozed out of a wood ceiling beam and swarmed the room. Even writing about that overabundance gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Large accumulations of a single object — animate or inanimate — cranks up the visual volume. Canadian artist-photographer Edward Burtynsky introduced viewers to the extreme-scale reality of global trade in Manufactured Landscapes from the first scene of some sewers bent over their machines in the Hongqingting Shoe Factory, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. There is no commentary as the camera slow-pans down the length of what emerges as a stadium-sized building full of several hundred workers, allowing us to fully grasp the enormity of this production. (And that was 20 years ago.)

If you stitch it (in public) they will come
​
An artist-instructor friend advised me, as I was preparing my portfolio to apply to art school, that if I was planning to include images of my quilts and rag rugs and mosaic’d vessels, I should group these as Craft Use Objects.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it but the word ‘craft’ seemed to have a stink to it. And the fact that these items were for actual use (as opposed to useless?) was also a bit whiffy. I spent the following six years of fine-arts studies needling at the question, What’s the use of art?

I eventually found two good uses for creating exhibition-type paintings, sculptures, floorworks and fibre installations: making use of used, disused or misused materials instead of consuming new materials; and growing community through the gathering of those materials. I monkeyed around with job-site debris delivered by construction workers; broken toys from my sister’s kids and her friends’ kids; old embroidered linens, doilies and buttons from my mother’s friends and other artists; jeans from my brother and others; old paintings from my father; burlap coffee bags from the coffee-roaster; pennies from friends; and businessmen’s white linen shirts from, well, businessmen.

In the end it all boiled down to one three-word artist statement: Making is connecting. This is not an original idea and maybe a little obvious but it’s been my roadmap for creating ever since.
​
Which brings me to “Shatter”, the title of my latest virtually/almost/nearly finished not-at-all-stinky Craft Use Object. (After many decades of making quilts I’ve decided that any quilts that are not direct copies of a pattern, that have taken on a personality of their own, deserve a title just as much as Artwork.) This one has emerged as a field of shattered circles, a project that shatters any expectations for this quilt and this quilter. It also relates to the times of its making, November 2024 to June 2025 — need I say more? “Shatter” is a cozy, slightly chaotic project that embeds silks and satins gifted by friends, as well as hours of focus, frustration and endurance, all in the service of creating the many meanings of comfort.

“Shatter” is an attention-getter. The pie-piece blocks of satin and gold top-stitching shimmer in the sun against the matte midnight-blue cotton background. It compelled some park visitors to comment as I bent over the binding. Nice quilt. I love quilts. Did you make this yourself? My grandmother was a quilter. I would love to learn to quilt. I found a great vintage quilt. Do you fix zippers? (Please stop asking me if I fix zippers.) By the end of the day “Shatter” was also the site of a long discussion with a friend broken up by her break-up. When all was said and done we stood up, hugged and I rolled up the quilt, the equivalent of seeing someone out of the office.
It remains rolled up, ready as another sunny, social setting or a cozy, tears-absorbent spot to stretch out on or curl up in.

Originally published on Substack earlier this summer.

It was quite the contrast to five years ago during my grad year when I had to fight the school’s installation technician to hang my final thesis work.

“What’s the point?” he said. “We’re shutting down, like, tomorrow.” The point, as every visual artist knows, is the photo-documentation for that fleeting moment of exhibition, especially fleeting in the hours before the pandemic lockdown. I pushed back on his push-back, he sighed dramatically and dragged the big ladder to the centre of the Sculpture Gallery.

I learned this need to be fierce and focused when it comes to displaying work from a moment of horror during my undergrad grad show a decade earlier.

I must have had a hunch that my installation might not go down as envisioned because I convinced my instructors to allocate me two final exhibit spaces since I had one foot in the painting department and the other in sculpture. The painting installation was easy: bang in two hooks, hang on wall. The sculpture piece was a little trickier. 

My dream was that those gallery-goers here for the sculpture, certainly a few internationally renowned curators and well-heeled collectors among them, would wander into my designated space in the third-floor room at the end of the long hall and stop in their tracks. What is this curious, lacy, bone-y floor installation?

Ah, I would say in a soft voice that I would still need to cultivate. I see you’ve noticed “Ravages.” A conversation would ensue. I would talk about my fascination with middens of bone and shell that hold clues to past and enduring Indigenous civilizations and cultures. I would speak to my own position as a settler descendant on this unceded coastal land, my anthropological curiosity awakened in high school that led to university studies in anthro/sociology. I would direct their eye to the use of found colonialist objects hand-crocheted in the round that evoke the fractal pattern of shoreline sandstone worn by time and event. I would link the distressed, chalky concretization of those abject objects to my immediate ever-changing environment of urban decay and hasty condo-tower construction, and my identity as a Mature Student trying not to feel like a decrepit bag of bones ha ha. You people get me!

Articulating the ideas in the making is an essential part of conceptual art studies and I spent weeks — months — thinking about how to talk about what I was making while scouring thrift stores for hand-made doilies and manipulating them in the sculpture lab to ossify with plasters then concrete thin-set. When that failed, I camped out in the mold-making shop mucking around with fibreglass and turning out copies of doilies in hardening acrylic too shiny so I coated them with gesso. Despite working under respirator my lungs complained and my skin erupted so when deadline hit for grad show submissions I went with what I had plus that large painting, a story for another time.

In the hours before opening night I assembled “Ravages,” propping some of the limp, cracking doilies onto each other house-of-cards style. The assembly was precarious but there was no breeze and I had a “Do not touch” sign beside the work so I went home to get fancified.

The main floor galleries were packed by 6pm, with people backing into dangling ceiling suspensions and failing to not step on floor installations. While my friends and family were preoccupied I slipped up to the empty third-floor room at the end of the hall. “Ravages” had collapsed into a pool of flat doilies like scraps from a factory floor. If it were not for the other students’ art I would have turned off the light and locked the door. Nothing to see here. I re-directed my people to the painting.

There is no photo-documentation of “Ravages;” some pictures are just too sad to take but here I am writing about it because there is a point in all this.
​
Art school, I want to tell all those kids holding bouquets and posing with friends beside their work last week, is not the culmination of your art-making ability but just your art right now. Unless you have a marketable skill like illustration, animation or industrial design, chances are you are going to have to do something else besides making art to earn a living and that’s okay; a fine arts degree is not a meal ticket.

But the art will continue to mature if you stick with it. It will evolve as you grow through all the unexpected events. It will bring you solace when nothing and no-one else can, and unlimited joy when it’s the purest way you know to express yourself. You may decide to drop it when life becomes too much but it’s never over; you’re just fallowing, building up rich experiences for your next chapter.

As for the Covid-era ECU installer, his labour was not for naught; the school did indeed shut down right after he helped secure my three large-scale fibre artworks but I can boast that it’s the longest held-over show in the Sculpture Gallery, intact for the entire summer with no one inside to view it but the mice. I biked by the campus every once in a while where it was easily seen from the street through the two high walls of windows, a gallery-sized still life. I took photos of that.
​
All three artworks have since been seen by more than mice in other exhibitions, with the latest being Classics Reimagined, a US-based online show of 30 mostly American artists. During another unexpected life moment, it’s the only way this outspoken Canadian gets to mingle with our besieged maker friends.

Escaping the dark world of scrolling the socials

“Take it outside” was a standard parenting directive back in the 1900s, shouted at the kids when pro-wrestling or trying to extricate a running shoe from the dog’s lock-jaw or whining for no reason. Taking it outside is harder to do if you live in an apartment tower but there’s no alternative if you’re a teenager hoping for a social life.

My old high school was surrounded by condo towers and mid-rise apartment buildings that are now being razed for higher towers. Hanging out indoors was not an option for many of my friends who lived in one-bedrooms with a single parent. Instead, we migrated from one friend’s building to another, buzzing intercoms to meet them in their lobbies and then go harass some other friend on shift at the Shoppers Drug Mart or hover in front of the fish-and-chips place to try to get the cute server to notice us. We mingled outside at the mini parks and the beach until we were old enough to get inside the clubs.

The club life is a dim memory but I am still compelled to take it outside. When the pandemic lockdown hit, I switched from working in an art studio to hand-stitching a large project on my porch. As the weather improved, I brought any old small thing to stitch to the neighbourhood park, two metres apart from others. That evolved into an improvisational mobile, outdoorsy art practice that begins with a piece of found linen, usually an old stained tablecloth that nobody wants.

Before heading outside I set the linen in the hoop then do a little table work, diluting paint with water and dropping it on the linen to watch the pigments spread through the taut fibres. Sometimes I sprinkle on more water or more undiluted pigment to saturate the colour or increase the bleed, or throw on some salt or soil or a slop of my coffee and observe those effects. I let that dry. I repeat all this in different sections of the linen, maybe including some of the tablecloth design or stitching, then decide which section could use some embroidery embellishments. I cut out that one preferred area, then choose a palette of embroidery floss. My mobile art practice is ready to go wherever I go.

The news is inescapable. The Trump tariffs announced last week will “rupture the global economy,” warns the Prime Minister. This is on top of the inflationary wallop on 45 per cent of Canadians who reported that rising prices were “greatly affecting their ability to meet day-to-day expenses in the spring of 2024, up 12 percentage points from two years earlier,” according to Statistics Canada. Further, almost one-third of Canadians are “experiencing financial difficulties,” up from 18.6 per cent in 2021. It’s all led to a “gradual deterioration in life satisfaction” especially among younger adults and those with financial difficulties. On top of all this, Canada is in the throes of a snap federal election.

Yet life goes on. That robin outside my window is still doing its 4 a.m. wake-up call. The cherry tree it perches on is about to burst into pink snowballs. Below the tree canopy the Amazon vans still roar through the neighbourhood and the UberEats drivers still double-park to keep up with their orders.

Maybe, and I’m just spit-balling here, we can be like the blossoms and flourish independent of the consumer economy and the attention economy, that battleground that has us in a near permanent state of distraction. I searched how reverse life dissatisfaction and received this AI Overview:

“To reverse life dissatisfaction, focus on identifying the root causes, setting realistic goals, practicing self-care, engaging in meaningful activities, and seeking support when needed.”
​
Even this banal Google-bot response on the general theme of self-reflection begins with the word ‘focus’, followed by ‘practicing’, ‘engaging’, ‘meaningful’, ‘activities’, ‘seeking’ and ‘support’ — words in direct opposition to ‘distraction’, ‘escaping’, ‘frivolous’, ‘inertia’, ‘ignoring’ and ‘undermine.’ There are no Tips and Tricks in the AI Overview for reversing life dissatisfaction through retail therapy, no easy instructions to move fast and break things, or buy bit-coin, self-medicate, move somewhere else or to hang on tight to your privilege.
​
The beautiful thing about having a number of ongoing art projects is that there’s always one that fits the moment. Right now that’s Hearth.

Started back in the beforetimes of 2019, Hearth is an infinitely-expanding grid of log-cabin quilt blocks that began with an idea: What kind of art-making would be engaging and easy enough to attract a diverse population, a big-picture zero-waste project that would cost nothing? What could create the chance to learn a new skill, meet people beyond one’s usual social circle, that would include the joys of giving and receiving, all toward a gallery exhibition?
​
Over the next six months, dozens of friends and friends-of-friends, neighbours, colleagues and people just happening by gathered at art studios, porches, around kitchen tables and living rooms. In groups from two to a dozen, we hand-stitched log-cabin-style quilt blocks from strips of donated fabric in improvised spirals around a central (“hearth”) square.

It takes about two hours for anyone who can hold a needle to stitch a block, about the same time as any social visit. The makers, many of whom learned that in fact they could sew a straight line, were free to take their finished piece home, maybe to use as a cushion cover, placemat or the beginning of a quilt top. Most contributed their blocks to the Hearth project so their own handwork would be a part of a gallery show, with due credit.
​
As normal daily activity resumed, I moved the one bin of fabric strips and the other of finished blocks into deep storage. But just as sure as that cherry tree outside my window will burst into bloom, that project is coming back out for a show of its own. It’s a new chance to focus on practicing engaging, meaningful activity designed for those seeking connection and support outside this dominant, volatile economic system, away from forces screaming for our attention. In these perilous times we’re creating something bigger than our individual selves, one stitch, one block at a time.​

(Originally published Feb. 23, 2025 on Substack)

I made a bit of a scene when Friedrich Irrgang confirmed that he was retiring after 62 short years in the timepiece-repair business. And just what will become of my wristwatch that he’s been bringing back from the dead on an irregular basis?, I asked him. The inner workings are falling apart, he said in the kind manner of a veterinarian examining someone’s geriatric bag-of-bones cat. True, the watch was a gift for my 30th birthday which was not yesterday or even this century but to let go of the watch and this neighbourhood shop at the same time? That, Herr Irrgang, is a brücke too far!
​
I know; this reaction was unbecoming for the full-grown woman that I am but the little personal losses are piling onto the big public losses like, say, faith in the future of democracy. It’s harder to counter the latest attack on societal norms with “At least” replies but I know I must stay positive, even when it comes to the small stuff! For example, instead of getting alarmed at my thinning hair, I can just go outside and brush out all my falling-out hairs for the birds to use for their nests! Or like when I spiral-fractured my arm but then turned the plaster cast into a model for sleeves I fashioned from dyed doilies. Lemons to lemonade!

Even my own painting disasters can bring me joy when I allow myself to fuck aroundexperiment with materials and ideas.

In summary: Less teeth-gnashing over what is lost or becoming lost; more creative engaging with materials and people; more investigating ways to transform the truly terrible; more joyful making in these perilous times.

When you spend a good portion of your winter cowering from the cold and the rain, it’s hard to fathom the fiery desert winds that are obliterating entire neighbourhoods just a three-hour flight south. In the near-real-time images and video only chimneys, mangled metal and concrete driveways hint at what used to be.

But then you notice the vestiges of palm trees, bougainvillea vines, laurel hedges, tufts of sisal and succulents. Before the last tendrils of smoke dissipate and the insurance battles begin, these plants hold the promise that buds and leaves will sprout and new colonizer species will emerge, boosted by an ashy soil. They are a reminder that whether it’s our perilous planet or our own contorting guts, flora heals.
​
This front line in ground recovery is below the surface, a mycelium network of fungal lace that can erupt in reproductive spores, most noticeably after wildfire as a bright orange carpet of tiny caplets.

The squirrels that inhabit my head have been threatening to start a roller derby so I’ve shut it all down by doing something constructive: I’m literally wrapping myself up in my ongoing Perfectly Imperfect quilt project.
​
I’m a construction team of one these dark days, bound up in binding together found satins, brocades and denim with cotton batting and mattress ticking. In this inherent need to make, I am a lady-in-waiting, making myself useful while the MAGA/Trump/tech-oligarchy snarl takes hold later this month.

I made my first quilt out of old bedsheets and pillowcases as a teenager for my little sister shortly after my mother gave me my first sewing machine and before I knew what I was doing. When my skills were adequate, I advanced to birthday and Christmas gifts and my own homey items like table runners and cushion covers, then moved on to crib quilts for babies, many of whose names I’ve forgotten and are now in their 30s, and for weddings for couples who are still together or have since divorced.
​
Many moons ago an aunt gave me a spiral-bound notebook with a picture of a quilt on the cover so I used it to stuff in all the photos, notes, design sketches and written correspondence related to each project. I see this book now as a personal history of learning about pattern, colour and cloth. I try not to wince at the early projects in the way that you should not berate the kid you once were. That bulging notebook is as multilayered as the under-construction Perfectly Imperfect quilt. Both are useful, improvisational objects embedded with explorations in form and function, and memories of the endurance, joy, frustration, satisfaction and an acceptance that the maker herself is a work in progress.

If the person I share the bed with is to be believed, this morning (as of this writing) I announced in my sleep: “I’m sorry we’re going to martial law again.”

I have only a dim notion of what martial law entails. I’m also not sure if this ‘sorry’ is in the Canadian sense, as in “Sorry bus full” on the rush-hour B-Line that really means “Suck it up, buttercup.” Or is it regret that martial law is again here? In any event, I’m impressed that my id (if you’re a Freud follower) even has a notion of the word ‘sorry.’
​
I assumed this bit of sleep babble was a call to end this seasonal distraction or maybe our collective distractive state in general. I admit I am worried about my own eroding focus exacerbated by the commercially- and politically-corrupted internet. And I’m not alone; half of US adults are getting their newsbits on TikTok, part of the bombardment of unrelated snippets of (mis)information from maybe humans but increasingly AI.

Over the years I have developed a near-obsessive way of working to evoke a seductive, unsettling visual field, somewhere between pretty and pretty distracting. This laborious process immerses the body in the subject while opening up time and space for the mind to consider some questions like: Are American reporters putting themselves in danger by exposing white supremacy groups? Is it safe to be trans in a small US town? Will women run the risk of more hate and harassment as the top trending phrases, “Your body, my choice” and “Get back to the kitchen” spread online? Is Canada the next alt-right nation? I’m concerned that as long as we’re preoccupied by our next Amazon orders to be fulfilled, or wasting hours killing foes in Call of Duty or dreaming of a career as an influencer, we’re not seeing some harsh political realities coming soon to a White House near you.

I wish I could be content to paint pastoral scenes or voluptuous florals that people would actually want hanging on their walls but this is where I’m at. I lose myself in this work of painting acrylic skins, slicing them into razor-sharp edges and right angles, then positioning them, layer after layer with tweezers and brayers, building and negating grids until my eyes start to cross and my back seizes up. And as the old song goes, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
​
I’m starting to think that my martial-law proclamation is directed at my own obsessiveness and toward good orderly direction. We’re all going to need that kind of focus in 2025.

Lately I’ve been asking anyone I come across: Is it just me or are we all sort of in a calm-before-the-storm, high-alert mode? So far, the score is 100-per-cent ‘Yes.’ Although in retrospect those affirmatives could mean, Yes you’ve asked me that already many times or Yes it is just you please let me pass.
My state of mind is somewhere between what former Village Voicejournalist/author Laurie Stone noted the night before this writing: “Everyone I know feels the edgy nothing” and satirist Samantha Bee’s last post: “Things are about to get fucking WILD.”
​
Anecdotal evidence through reading rational opinion reveals that countless numbers of engaged humans are not waiting to exhale but bracing for impact of the incoming turbulence in the Divided States of America — and beyond. The unknown is unnerving. It’s also intentional and we’ve seen it before:

Above: That other lying Donald, back in a 2002 press conference spreadingthe Big Lie that launched the catastrophic war in Iraq.

Living in the unknown has already taken its toll as seen during the global pandemic. Heightened fear and paranoia have morphed into the cultish desire for a strongman/daddy figure to fix it and us. And the geo-political trend shows no nation is immune.

To anyone prone to dismissing me by using the C-word (catastrophizing — what were you thinking?), consider this pre-emptive journalistic self-censoring under Trump 2.0: the two MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts apologizing on air last week for possibly offending Fox News. (See “‘Morning Joe' Sorry David Frum Made Forbidden Joke About Fox News, Please Don't Hurt Them!”) To be clear, this is a left-leaning cable TV network obeying in advance by apologizing to “one of the most malevolent corporations in all of America, whose decades of lies, propaganda, and racist brainwashing are perhaps more responsible than any other single entity for America’s current slide into brain-damaged ethno-fascism,” in the words of the managing editor of Wonkette. Frum, a Canadian-American former Republican and speechwriter for George W. Bush then took issue with its apology in The Atlantic with the kicker: “It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease.”

Suffice it to say this is an early-warning signal that the way things are now won’t be the way things are after Jan. 6. But how to proceed until the big hammers come down on respected, fearless journalists and all the other perceived enemies? Is it more helpful to read Robert Reich’s latest, “How Trump could bring on a second civil war” or bingeing How to Become a Tyrant on Netflix? (True, there is no mention of the American meddling in the making of some of those dictators but the playbook tracks.)
​
I’ll think on that while I continue to do like the kids and live in the moment, channeling creative energy, even — or especially — the negative.