Artist’s Statement

After graduating from art high school and art college, I spent several years painting, travelling and working in many different mediums. I took part in a performance art festival in Toronto called 7A*11d where I recreated a turn of the century travelling medicine show, selling herbal products I had made out of a cart I built from found objects. This was such a success I decided to make a career out of it. In 2000, my partner Gavin North and I started our farm-based business, Honey Pie Hives & Herbals. I’ve always seen this as part performance art, part craft and part agriculture. A constant during all of this has been a love for knitting, crochet and natural dyeing. In 2018 I got back into natural dyeing in a big way and started selling naturally dyed yarn.

In the last few years I’ve started to make art using the fleece of local sheep as my medium. I dye the wool, spin it and use knitting and crochet to make art inspired by the natural environment I live in. I love the intersection of art and agriculture. I’m particularly interested in rewilding and the process of decay and regrowth as nature transforms the human attempts at domination into the wild again.

Education

Graduate of Arts Canterbury High School in visual art, 1990

Graduate of the Ontario College of Art in Drawing and Painting, 1995

Attended the Florence off campus program in Florence, Italy 1994