My current work started underneath the Prince of Wales bridge on a warm summer afternoon in 2014 with a 4 inch square painting of the tea coloured Ottawa river. Six years later, I would mix water, tubes, shells, vessels, viruses, bones, the valleys of Mars, and the storm clouds of Jupiter into this palette. For me, the river and the fluidity of paint are the same. Her stains, her flow, her reflections draw us into the messy, muddy creaturely world living underneath. This river supports an ecology that  feeds two large cities, and several small communities yet like many other rivers across the world: her health is taken for granted. The 21 century has become a time of so many environmental losses that scientists call it the Anthropocene.

 

As we say goodbye to nature as we knew it;  to the polar bear, to the monarch butterfly, to ice in the Arctic, and to the concept of natural food: we can see past the mirror of such a sad reality into the wonders of the quantum world.  Beginning in 1995, with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, and with astronomers counting the tiniest flickers of distant suns; earthlings have come to accept that we are not alone, and even that alien worlds may look nothing like that of our lush, blue- green planet. We have seen Earth from the skies of Mars. From the planets rusty red desert we look downright soggy or in Carl Sagans words: like a pale blue dot. The Hubble telescope reflects a beauty in the universe so strong that it compels us to imagine all the potential muddy creaturely worlds spinning around billions of other suns. I try to capture this time of both loss and wonder by exploring the relationship between depth and surface and between transparency and reflection in each new painting.