Project Statement

In 2018, after relocating back to Ontario from the United Kingdom I spent six months driving across Canada (my home country), visiting all of the twelve provinces and territories that are accessible by private vehicle. This 44,000-kilometer journey, from Newfoundland’s east coast to the west coast of Vancouver Island, via the northern remit of NWT and the Arctic Circle in the Yukon, acted as a pilgrimage of research, experience,
and discovery. Both moving and traveling have left me with newfound understandings of what ‘home’ can signify – something mutually transient and stable.

As a result of these recent experiences, I am currently working on a body of work that uses provincial/territorial delineations as an arbitrary structure from which to consider the vastness of the landscape of Canada and my personal experiences of it. I am in the process of developing a series of gouache drawings (one drawing per province/territory) reinterpreted from an archive of images and objects collected while travelling. These
works explore and address themes of curiosity, the keepsake/memento, memory and ‘home,’ alongside the transitional/migration process of relocation. These gouache drawings are intended to evoke fluid and changing concepts of my experiences of environment and community. Adopting the same size and scale of field in each drawing, they are to elicit the sense of a hand-hewn memento, suggesting an intimacy and
adoration of place.

For the Forest City Gallery artist residency, my latest series of drawings acted as a foundation for the creation of larger three-dimensional drawing/installations that celebrate Canada’s diverse landscape. The installations, using the gouache drawings as a point of departure, become a somatic experience where a physicality of shape, movement, colour and pattern convey that an ecstatic landscape cannot just be seen as a framed visage, but also as an immersive experience. This installation, Traverse is intended to allow one to reflect on their own memory/experiences of ‘nature’, ‘place’ and ‘home’ allowing a perception and interpretive experience of Canada from both a micro and macro perspective.
 

The particular province I chose to engage with during my residency is Ontario. During my 2018 cross Canada sojourn, I spent considerable time experiencing and visiting locations in remote areas of my home province. As a result, this was an opportunity to further develop my connection with those unfamiliar regions and consider various strategies of how one “pictures” and engages a stream of images and memories from a
two-dimensional planar surface to a three-dimensional perspective and experience.