Artist Statement

I have been experimenting with primarily figurative, portrait genre painted woodcut blocks for over twenty years since being introduced to the medium by printmakers at the Alberta College of Art and Design (now AUArts). I don't make prints from the woodcuts, but prefer the tactile quality of the blocks themselves.

There are several ongoing portrait series that I work on, such as ¿Quién es más macho?, which allows me to satirize popular culture gender stereotypes. Other series include Topical Ointment, Sideshow, Festival of Wrongheadedness, Take Me to Your Leader, and Honky Tonkin' Honey, Baby. I also work on an ongoing series of glossy enamel icons and text-based Pop woodcuts. In 2013 I installed a series of these on the exterior of private residences in inner city Calgary, for my pay-it-forward public art project, Pophouse. I am endlessly interested in animating public spaces with original art, and contributing to the shared experience of living within art-filled communities.

For the past several years, I have also been extremely interested in amateur ornithology and have carved over a thousand studies of wild birds, working exclusively with reclaimed and upcycled wood. The most recent development in this series is the use of damask, geometric, and katagami patterned backgrounds. These patterns flatten the picture plane and create a visual intersection between the chaotic beauty of nature and the controlled beauty of design.

In 2018 I completed a series of seventy Pop woodcuts based on mid-century anonymous photobooth self-portraits by women. In 2019 I transformed an Indonesian soup cart, called a kaki lima, into a new pushcart artmobile dispensary, CART Blanche, which debuted on the River Walk, Calgary, distributing free small scale works on paper. This year, motivated by our current social and environmental dystopian crossroads, I have started carving curved oak seatbacks salvaged from the renovation of the Martha Cohen Theatre for my new series, POP Apocalypse.