"From the Ground Up"
Saturday, April 10th - May 1st, 2010
Artbeat Gallery
26 St. Anne Street,
St. Albert
(780) 459-3679
Click here to read an article about the artists in Lifestyle Magazine.
From the Ground Up
For someone whose work has depicted florals extensively for a number of years, the title "From the Ground Up" might seem almost redundant. For this series, however, my thoughts have tried to dig a little deeper. To me, “From the ground up” suggests roots and connections, beginnings; it has provided me an opportunity to look at my passion’s own beginnings.
To my knowledge, this strong connection to plants began in early childhood. Those early years were spent in places up and down the Northwest coast of British Columbia, home to the world’s largest temperate rainforests. We even spent a few years on the Queen Charlotte Islands, what some call the "Galapagos of the North”. These lush, verdant environs were my playground, my ‘sandbox’.
The pieces in this series belie some of those earliest memories—long days spent under the magical canopy of gigantic cedars and spruce, creating fantastical adventures amid soft moss-covered peat and the legion of low-growing fungi, ferns and plants carpeting the forest floor. Pockets of old tree roots became our forts and secret hideaways, huge skunk cabbage leaves were our ‘dishes’, baskets, blankets, umbrellas, handfuls of berries (blueberries, salmonberries, huckleberries) kept us nourished as we explored. The natural beauty that was all around was a constant in my life—when I was happy or sad, angry, feeling alone or just wanting to be alone, it was always there, it was a comfort and refuge.
As an adult I love to be in my garden, it is a sanctuary, and although I am passionate about it, I am not a good gardener. My garden is rough and haphazard and sometimes weed-infested. In my quilts the images I depict are those ‘spots’ of beauty that exist in even the messiest of gardens if we stop to look. If I dig deep, what my garden (and my art) provides me now is that wild, living and breathing space I came to love as a child, a place that nourished me.
