Home is…, shown as part of the 2024 “Strictly Local” exhibition at the Helson Gallery in the Halton Hills Cultural Centre…

Artist Statement: For me and my family, Halton Hills is home, and home is belonging, community, and freedom. It is both a material experience and a feeling shared with others. I here imagine home as the realization of Fannie Lou Hamer’s “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” I imagine the rejection of an emphasis on individual advancement and profit in favour of a commitment to a communal ethic of responsibility. I imagine a world that upholds Indigenous rights. Home is a place to be defended and for which we all should care.

The Greatest and Miles & Peter, shown as part of the 2023 Halton Hills Cultural Centre and Helson Gallery Holiday Show & Sale…

The Owl is a Judge depicts the Great Horned Owl in renditions evoking its complicated symbolic relationship with humankind…

Shown as part of the 2023 “Art for the Birds” exhibition in the Sisnett Lobby at the Halton Hills Cultural Centre, The Owl is a Judge depicts the Great Horned Owl who, while the most common type of owl in North America, is anything but ordinary. Also known as the “tiger of the air,” it is a fierce and indiscriminate predator equipped with excellent night vision and strong talons. Wendy Makoons Geniusz, author of “Gookooko’oog: Owls and Their Role in Anishinaabe Culture” (2008), investigates the origins of the Owl as a creature to be feared; she concludes that “Gookooko’oo [the Owl] is not someone to fear, and that those who fear this being only understand a small portion of Anishinaabe teachings about Gookooko’oo. . . . In reality, Gookooko’oo is used by parents to scare unruly children, is appropriated by evil doers, is a messenger who can give us important warnings, is someone who helps those who have already passed on to reach the other side, and is someone who can be our benefactor” (241). Given its many personas, the Great Horned Owl is here depicted in varying renditions meant to represent its complicated symbolic relationship with humankind.

The Traveller is a series of mixed media images depicting the subject, in the foreground, venturing into new worlds and perspectives…

Shown as part of the 2023 “Locally Grown: Further Afield” exhibition at the Helson Gallery in the Halton Hills Cultural Centre, The Traveller: Other-Worldly Views depicts the subject, in the foreground, on a journey wherein the world appears both familiar and strange. It is meant to capture how, as we move Further Afield, we might examine and question conventional assumptions about the world, many of which are deeply entrenched in our ways of being and thinking. Such inquiry can be an exhilarating, but also a disorienting process. The piece suggests that travel, whether locally or abroad, whether physically or mentally, allows for expanded horizons, experience to be (re-)contextualized, and the taken-for-granted to be acknowledged and challenged.