I have found a way of working that is informed by process and discovery. My task as an artist: set things in motion, find the beauty when it shows up.

I begin my work by entering a space of not knowing, always avoiding pre-conceived outcomes. Favouring open-ended methods, I alternate between intuition and reason, chaos and precision, waiting for the work to reveal itself.

Water had been the defining medium in my art process since 2019: I pour water from jugs, spray water from a bottle, and the water delivers magic. I hold a fascination with the fluid suggestive forms and textures derived from these processes, which convey sensations of movement, transparency, layering, lightness.

With the opportunity to spend the last year in a kind of extended meditation on the theme transformed by water, I would go deeper into this fascination.

How does water inspire/inform an artistic practice?

Water makes our world. Water doesn’t create life but miraculously makes all life possible. All of it. Everything.

Water is the facilitator. It allows the chemistry of life to take place by being solvent, transport medium, temperature regulator and structural component. By responding constantly to all stimuli, a light breeze, the pull of the moon, a change in temperature.

Water is our connection to unknowable mysteries, to spiritual notions. Suspended in water before we are born, (as were our fish ancestors) consciousness miraculously arrives. Our bodies are 60% water…will consciousness, soul, spirit, transform when we are gone..as brook becomes cloud?

Water as transformer, restlessly changing state: sea becomes haze becomes cloud becomes snow becomes glacier becomes river becomes…with endlessly fascinating translucency, transparency, reflection, rippling surfaces, cloud shapes, icebergs floating by. Washing over us as music, the undulating rhythm of swells, repeating echoes as waves wash ashore, the soothing patter of rain. It manifests everything…water becomes the storm, displays tranquility when all is calm.

Water shapes our world. Deep layers of sand deposited and consolidated into stone, rivers carving the landscape, the earth’s crust weighed down by massive ice sheets, mountains scoured down into gravel, ripples imprinted on sand with the receding tide. The ”shape” of continents, the borders of countries: these lines that we trace mark where the earth’s surface emerges above water level. Most of us live along this undulating edge, the coast, the shore, the riverbank.

Our first mirror, water gives us a glimpse of ourselves, magically doubled as illusion.

EVENTS:

Artist pARTy: August 30th, 6-8pm. Please join us!