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.
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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.
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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.

(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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.

Making ourselves whole through making
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First there is shock. I saw it in a coffee shop in a small US city the morning Trump was elected — again. The place was full but hushed. “Are you okay?”, one customer after another whispered to the three female baristas. Nods. Shrugs. Back to work.

Another shock hit the next day, when a friend confirmed our worst fears: the cancer had spread, nothing more for it. Silence, then tears all around.

First the shock, then the rage. Why? Why now? Why them? Why us? We cast around for blame. Eventually we arrive at the only thing for it: regrouping, starting from the self and working out from there.

My no-nonsense inner grandlady tells me to Get a hold of yourself, advice I take in the most loving way. I hold myself up by burrowing in for a nap, taking a walk wherever the trees are, sinking into a hot bath. There is a kind of exquisiteness during this inward time of radical self-care. This engagement with the physical world is a humane activity that breaks the paralysis, the start of ‘getting it together’ or gathering oneself.

Gathering is also a trauma response to life-shattering events (look at hoarding). The urge to collect the shards and scraps is an attempt to make ourselves whole. I find solace in pulling together material scraps of handwork by other makers and other traditions, not to recreate the past but to consider new possibilities, new forms. Puzzling over textures and techniques is quiet, contemplative work. There is no pre-planning, no goal-setting to be achieved; I’m simply forging connections, intent on finding a fresh beauty in the rejected and damaged remains, one stitch at a time in a sort of personal/political practice.

After we collect ourselves we collect up with others because we humans are pack animals. We share our grief because we know that that emotion is a monster not to be ignored. Even the kitties or pups instinctively know when the moment calls for cozying up to their people.
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Some of us share our art because we have to. We brew up a mug of Bengal Spice tea, clear a space on the table heaped with scraps of fabric, unravelling lace and stained embroidered linens, plug in the laptop and open an empty screen. And we reach out.

Working out those wrinkles is so satisfyingIf you’re uselessly wringing your hands right about now, pump some iron.
Hear me out: Ironing is useful, which, in the few days left before the US election, is the opposite position of those of us watching who can’t vote or compel Americans to vote. With democracy itself teetering on the brink it’s best to stop flitting about, pants on fire, and instead grab onto something stable and practical. Just maybe don’t do it in front of the latest broadcast of any of the mega-rich misogynists’ rallying cries; the TV screen is no match to an overhand launch of an iron.
If you’re rolling your eyes at this suggestion you may still be triggered by the iron as symbol of just more unpaid women’s housework, promoted through those post-war images of an ecstatic housewife standing before the only board she has access to. If you view her hubby’s freshly starched white shirt as his day pass out of one of those little boxes made of ticky-tacky, you are still afflicted.
I get it; letting go of the iron-as-shackles connection doesn’t come easy when you are born into that milieu. My cousin recently shared a photo of the two of us, as young as six, standing knock-kneed in skirts and knee-socks at a kid-sized ironing board, playing ironing yet there was little evidence of ironing activity in my own childhood home. This shit was insidious. 
Inflation was hitting hard those days, and the petrochemical industry found an opportunity: pushing polyester as the time-saver for women who by choice or necessity entered the workforce. When my grandmother found herself single in her 40s she traded her home-sewn floral cotton dresses for Sears Fortrel mix ’n’ match coordinates, got her teacher’s certificate and moved to a remote town for work. My McDonald’s uniform was an itchy kelly-green combo of stretch pants and striped zip-up collared top.
Skip forward a few decades and we’re barely treading water in the synthetic polymersea of fast-fashion clothing that fuels microplastic pollution.

Ironing has no role in this wrinkle-free, race-to-the-bottom system. It’s part of the repairing-is-caring continuum toward a circular economy of natural-fibre clothing and toward our own well-being. It relaxes both rumpled, creased woven cottons and linens and our fine selves. You can’t doom-scroll when you’re gliding across a soft surface, settling wrinkles with puffs of steam. Ahhhhhh. 
Quilters know all about the rewards of ironing following hours of wrestling bits of fabric into new arrangements with a temperamental sewing machine. Even the wonkiest quilt blocks in that stack “will all press out.” Ohhhmmm.
The time spent ironing favourite linens and natural-fibre clothing is an investment in those pieces, a time for personal reflection on their making and their makers. Grandma Flo may have embraced her wash-and-wear polyester pieces but she never abandoned ironing her quality dressy things or her fine cutwork table linens hand-stitched by her sisters. When it was my turn to have her over for tea she would tsk-tsk at my creased tablecloth. That it was thrifted was no excuse; all linens deserved pressing. 
A decade after her death I created a part-figurative alterpiece anchored by a Teflon iron plate. The assemblage of found objects reflects her strength in the face of tumultuous change and the little pleasures of her everyday like teatimes, decoration and costume jewelry.

I’m just kidding about the hat; we Westcoast Canadians have umbrellas for that, at least for a solid seven months out of the year (and we wonder why we’re considered a reserved lot). I trashed the hat shortly after parading around in it for a little levity during Lockdown 2020. In retrospect, ridding myself of the wide-brimmed artwork was overly aspirational. I was obviously oblivious to the power of airborne illnesses to return like that damn leak in my studio every time it rains.

The joke’s on me these days. Embracing more social-distancing practices could have saved me from the cold/flu thing that hit Labour Day weekend and settled into my bottom right lung as pneumonia by month’s end. I did take general precautions: stayed home or sequestered in my leaky studio when I was feeling poorly; bowed out from gatherings and even coffee-shop meetings; took four of the reliable at-home COVID-19 tests over the course of this cough, even doing the whole thorough gaggy throat-scrape method. When they came out negative, I went back out into the world. I was sick of the social isolation.

I was so ready to re-gather with friends that I willed myself to not notice that all the women pushing the dim-sum carts were in masks, even as I barrelled past them to go outside for a coughing fit. I did take advantage of courtesy hand-sanitizer pump bottles at the entrance of shops and public buildings but I did not, would not see the masked-up cashiers, receptionists, servers, tellers and baristas as a sign that I should be following suit.
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For the record, I was an early mask-adopter even before the spring of 2020. I saw more foreign-exchange students at art school masking up as early as January, and by the end of February, many weren’t coming into class at all. Seeing people in masks was normal to me since my 20s when I lived in Japan, where several commuters in any given train car were masked up, even little kids. When I moved back to Vancouver I lived near Chinatown where masks on faces are commonplace. So by the time the mask mandatehit I was already on it.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.
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I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.
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Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

When I first started out as a suburban-newspaper reporter I had a single original artwork tacked to the wall in my basement suite. It was a life-sized acrylic-on-paper, a nude holding her maybe-pregnant belly against a landscape of spewing factories and techni-coloured streams.

I watched this gaunt, world-weary figure emerge in watery brushstrokes from the hand of the newspaper photographer's girlfriend. This is how she worked, in their basement suite, pulling yardage from a large roll of cheap paper, painting straight from her head and heart, with no plan to keep or show or sell her paintings. She saw that this one resonated with me too — what twenty-something in a committed relationship doesn’t have this weighing on her mind? So she gave it to me.

Hanging it felt like supporting an ally, even if it was only hanging in my dark, featureless space that nobody would see besides the boyfriend on weekends. Then one day some of his family made the trip for a visit. They complimented my hanging flower baskets, my thrifty decor. I didn’t hear until much later that the painting had become a topic of conversation among various relatives, a bit of a joke about that subject and, by extension in my mind, this girlfriend.

I had none of the inner fortitude to see this painting or my choices as acceptable and eventually I rolled it up and hid it in a closet. I married into that family within three years. The boxed wedding dress joined the poster tube containing the offending painting for two more moves until I finally ditched the artwork at the Sally Ann. The dress is another story.

But I did keep something from that painting: some lessons that have informed an aesthetic that I carry to this day but might not even recognize until after each artwork is completed, or is at least on its trajectory.

The first is the power of attraction. Not to be confused with the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction, this is a drive to create aesthetically-pleasing, familiar domestic objects and fields that upon closer inspection have something else to say besides cozy or pretty. An early example of one of my pretty/pretty disturbing objects is Clutch (2007). Hundreds of sewing pins were pierced into a thrifted clutch purse in a colourful beaded pattern covering the entire surface. The clasp opens to reveal an impenetrable thicket of steely pointy ends.

Another valuable lesson is context, or time and place. Gallery-goers may prepare themselves to be confronted by artwork but I don’t wish that on houseguests. There are none of those Live-Love-Laugh type directives or IKEA Eiffel Towers and tulips on the walls at home, but what is there is selected to engage, not repel. Home is a place to feel safe. The studio is a place to not play it safe, but it’s still a covert operation, playing on that first impression of domestic objects that reveal cracks in the beauty of the everyday.

I’ve also learned that my creative energy comes from joy, not pain. I have no urge to make when I barely have enough hope for the day to put on pants. Heavy realities may be the driving force but the work develops from a position of hope for comfort and social connection, a hunger for nourishment of new ideas and new materials to explore. The joy is in learning while doing, imagining new collective futures.

Finally, my position is not fixed. In my mind I have that 1985 photo portrait of Lily Tomlin in a black T-shirt with white lettering that screams EVOLVE OR DIE. And look at her now. My sensibilities are always shifting and I am growing more at peace with the idea that what other people say about me is none of my business. When an artist friend turned 50 on an artists’ retreat the rest of us toasted her in a welcome to the I Don’t Give a Shit Club. When you’re part of that club you stop second-guessing every decision and tending to other people’s feelings first.

This is how I recently became the owner of Fuckwit. I was attracted by the sweet rosebud fabric appliqued in tiny blanket stitches precise as Letraset on a lacy linen. I like the artist's choice of font and word. It’s an overt, uncomplicated work that hangs near the front door, visible before guests would even have their coat off. If people get offended, blame the artist, not me. I just like the beauty in that crack.