Hello! This is the story of an artist and arts administrator who, in 2013, made the switch to arts administrator and artist. Subtle sentence restructure, huge identity shift.
And then, in 2017, I went ahead and had a baby. I suppose another work of art? And now, many years after that shift, and 8 years after becoming a parent, I’m figuring out how to do all those things at the same time in a more balanced way. I’m re-learning how to be an artist that fits with my life today.
These days, I work collaboratively with the 44.4 Mother Artist Collective, I have a day job at the Canada Council for the Arts in the Prizes department, I play a lot of tennis, dress up in costumes more than I did as a child, and hang out with my beautifully weird child. I want to normalize being an okay artist and an okay mom.
I have new work in 44.4‘s newest exhibition, Don’t Worry, I’ll Only Show You The Good Parts at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery from March 13 – June 1, 2025.
Don’t Worry, I’ll Only Show You the Good Parts delves into the intricate conversations surrounding the multifaceted realities, ambitions and challenges faced by a local group of Mothers/Artists. In this exhibition, the 44.4 Mother/Artist Collective invites us into an intimate tension within their daily lives: art-making and caregiving. Through their work, Mothers/Artists of the 44.4 Collective are piecing together time, space, resources and cognitive labour to create art, while at the same time fulfilling the repetitive, cyclical and often mundane caregiving tasks that weave through the lives of their children, families and their communities.
My piece, Every Life is a Universe uses forms and materials from hobbyist model kits to create a fictional cemetery of tombstones with unusual epitaphs. Sourced from books, tv shows, podcasts, work meetings, gossip, and everyday conversations, these epitaphs explore what it would be like to honour people in more honest, nuanced ways rather than adhere to the typical honorifics that only highlight the good parts of a person’s life.
Every Life is a Universe is inspired by the talmudic text “anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.”
This work is about the complicated nature of grieving complicated people and the complicated relationships between these complicated people.