Behavioural Enrichment is a series of paintings of fictional zoo exhibits; the body of work as a whole creates a silent zoo. The paintings merge imagery and draw comparisons between the stage-like sets of mid-century interior design photographs and Western zoos exhibits. The paintings present curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the ideal home. The contained curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the painted environments are complete with props of still-lifes, behavioural enrichment devices from zoos, and animal actors. These strange worlds of artifice are constructed with images within images: odd compositions and disintegrating spaces that balance between an illusion of depth and an abstract flatness. The work provides a space for the imagination to contemplate many possible metaphors.

“A Strange Loop” explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself.

'Galore' is a series of drawings that celebrate the urge to reproduce and multiply ‘beauty’. Working from a collection of appropriated photographs, I have produced a suite of small-scale ballpoint pen drawings that explore issues of desire and mortality through the rendered idealization and categorization of beautiful male types. This work is framed within a theoretical discussion of productive desire and the question of beauty as motivation to copy. Metaphorical associations of the cut flower with the disembodied human head are also examined in relation to the vanitas genre of art.

Behavioural Enrichment is a series of paintings of fictional zoo exhibits; the body of work as a whole creates a silent zoo. The paintings merge imagery and draw comparisons between the stage-like sets of mid-century interior design photographs and Western zoos exhibits. The paintings present curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the ideal home. The contained curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the painted environments are complete with props of still-lifes, behavioural enrichment devices from zoos, and animal actors. These strange worlds of artifice are constructed with images within images: odd compositions and disintegrating spaces that balance between an illusion of depth and an abstract flatness. The work provides a space for the imagination to contemplate many possible metaphors.

“A Strange Loop” explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself.

'Galore' is a series of drawings that celebrate the urge to reproduce and multiply ‘beauty’. Working from a collection of appropriated photographs, I have produced a suite of small-scale ballpoint pen drawings that explore issues of desire and mortality through the rendered idealization and categorization of beautiful male types. This work is framed within a theoretical discussion of productive desire and the question of beauty as motivation to copy. Metaphorical associations of the cut flower with the disembodied human head are also examined in relation to the vanitas genre of art.

Passing Through, an installation of photography, encourages the nature of memory through an engagement with the materiality of photographic images. Considering memory as an ephemeral phenomenon, I am interested in exploring the emotional and psychological affects that images have on the body and mind. Strategies of collecting and tracing are employed as a means of forming connections between people, places, materials, objects, and images. Recounting personal history, storytelling and participating in the immediate present, I actively seek out images as a means for re-experiencing memory. Triggers reveal themselves during the collection and deconstruction of both personal and found photographic material. Re-assembling this information produces an archive consisting of real and re-imagined fragments of spaces and narratives. Together, these processes produce a body of work that considers the image as an experiential entity that is inherently memory based; triggering memory to create an emotive response in the viewer.

The Gesture and the Drip investigates our increasing reliance on digital media as a means to encounter and view art works online as photographic documentation. This body of work attempts to place significance on the human gesture in relation to the loss of the human presence that often accompanies digital documentation. The gesture is a reoccurring element that can be traced throughout my thesis body of work. Occasionally, gestures are tactile marks made by my hand and in other cases they are the result of photographic reproduction, silk-screened onto the surface. A paradox is formed between the real and illusion that are interchangeable on the canvas. My paintings encompass authentic and mediated gestures to challenge the visual experience and disrupt a logical reading.

My paintings are done from my memory of nature experienced at different moments in time and place in Canada and Europe, discovered during my frequent travels. Colour, light, movement, smell and sound recalled in memory, lead to abstract formulations in which an expressive softness is mixed with harsh reality.

This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition Word Birds that was held at the Render Gallery at the University of Waterloo, April 22-27, 2008. The drawing and sculpture in this exhibition attempt to address the complex relationship humans have with animals and the ways we have charged them with symbolic and anthropomorphic characteristics. The work examines the human tendency to observe, name, and ascribe meaning to animals and speaks to the connection between natural history and human nature. The narrative element of the work is derived from a variety of sources including observation, philosophical speculation, and literary sources.