About the work

Memories have always been a predominant theme in my work. I practice art with the belief that one of our most important roles as an artist is to use our work to ask questions about the world around us and then try to answer them. The questions I have been asking in my work for the past five years pertain mostly to the world in which my children participate along with reminiscences growing up in Canada in a much simpler time. One subject I’ve explored in my work examines my family and our friends cavorting on California beaches. Brief, rare idyllic freedoms that is far too few for today’s youth growing up in our overprotective world. Watching local surfers hang out in Malibu and Ventura are also typical inspirations. More recently I began exploring imagery of the Toronto lakeshore of my childhood. Despite the familiarity and comfort of these themes, I am always left with a deep dissatisfaction that my questions are perhaps too personal and not very provocative or “avant-garde” enough and that my work reads as naive. In the back of mind the parallels I am asking are if my children will reflect on their childhood as free and as happy as mine was growing up in Toronto, Canada or will they know they grew up in a less innocent world? I want people who see my work to come into contact with Toronto, (or LA for that matter) through my rose tinted glasses. This is how I want my work to be experienced, not through its government strikes or dirty slushy winters but as a thriving Chinatown where I had bowls of consommé on rainy days as a little girl, of the corner variety store where my father grew up and of endless deep Canadian blue skies and as a city that has, for me, never lost its innocence.