Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too
“Your hair seems blue,” a friend noted over dinner. It really is. I’ve joined the blue-rinse gang — emphasis on the blue. Denim blue is an unnatural hair hue that seems only natural now that…
Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city
I t feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I’ve raised my camera (phone) to capture an…
Urban design lesson for Vancouver: Life in full colour blooms in car-free streets
A month after I landed in Guanajuato , Mexico it finally dawned on me: there are no traffic lights in this bustling city . You’d think that would be obvious from the outset but those kinds of details…
Searching for patterns in a confounding, enchanting medieval city
Confundo . (I am confounded.) Never mind that I arrived in a medieval city in Mexico in the middle of the night after a stomach-churning 10-hour bus ride from the coast. Never mind that the next…
Big painting shift at little house on the prairie
I’ve just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the…
Solar-powered Work Wraps:100% pure Lasqueti Free Store
This all started with too much stuff: the glut of stuff at the Lasqueti Free Store and all my own stuff I need to keep on my person, even more stuff than in my purse life in Vancouver. I work…
Dream house social engagement project is just a fantasy in too-far-gone Vancouver
I have been preoccupied these past months with a basic question: Where is my forever home? I’ve lived in the same Kitsilano condo since 1995 yet I never felt truly at home in a building, with a lobby…
Kiddie chaos just the trick for restarting the creative engine
For the last six Saturdays I have thrown open my studio doors to seven kids between the ages of 5 and 7, ostensibly to offer some art classes, but really, this was for me. I had been feeling a…
irrational acts of tidying up and doodling a magical combo
Every time I turn around someone’s got her nose in Marie Kondo’s international bestseller book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or they’re doodling zentangles . I’ve mixed both into one…
Public art is not decoration; it’s a thoughtful disruptor
As I was wrapping bolts of fabric around the Haywood Bandstand across from English Bay last Friday, a few intrepid dog-walkers approached me, shouting over the gale-force winds and all basically…
Re-imagining a city fixture as a bright beacon of hope
My mother remembers seeing a military band perform in the Alexandra Park bandstand across from English Bay, in the early 1950s. I watched a Jazz Festival performance there this summer. But the…
One girl’s crow dream, from drawing to costume
What with all the trips to the thrift shops, followed by a frenzy of snip-snipping and glue-gun-play, the posting part of Halloween takes a back seat.
Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday
Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff’s peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making…
Letting go of those heavy memories not so easy
It is excruciating to junk a piece of, well, in this case, junk. But it has to be done. Such is the reality of the Vancouver maker who likes to work large but lives in a small space. So I…
Mad Max movie inspires big thinking on broken toy sculptures
Just for the record, my Toybits were created far, far before Mad Max: Fury Road hit the theatres — a lthough the resemblance of those Metallica-esque assault vehicles to my small sculptures is…
How mosaic ‘Tagging’ made an east van alley someplace special
I’m sure I didn’t come up with the term ‘mosaic tagging’ but the idea of embedding found remnants of domestic culture into the built landscape has been rolling around my brain for a while. It…
Hope springs forth from lush, haunting images
I really want to believe our Prime Minister’s — what, pledge? Hope? Prediction? — that we will be a fossil-fuel-free nation by the year 2100, as he told the rest of the Gang of 7 at their…
Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event
I’m not knocking social media. Hi tting ‘Like’ to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP’s office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is…
Share-worthy images battle big oil and beyond
My mother shared the above image in a Facebook link with me because she knows what makes my heart go thumpety-thump: a dazzling visual pattern tied to a hefty underlying concept.
Playing with mud — and new/old ideas
Playing with mainly found materials, and whenever possible with other people, offers me the chance to learn about properties and potential of those throw-away materials as well as about collaborative…
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