Biography

A dozen years ago, another student called me “a bag lady with a fertile imagination”, and she may have had a point.

My artistic career has been relatively brief, but my exposure to the arts began over a half-century ago in tiny seaside villages in the southwest of England, where my father made his living as a creative photographer. Before I turned to the arts myself, I studied midwifery and nursing in London, emigrated to Canada, and raised a family in Montreal. In the mid-1990s, I completed a fine arts degree at Concordia, and then re-settled in Northumberland County.

My studio, a small cottage overlooking the Lake Ontario shoreline, contains a huge variety of “art supplies” – boxes of small springs, antique blue flashbulbs, shimmering ribbons of cloth, dried seed pods, dozens of colours of nail polish, and many books.

I have made my home in big cities, and in sparsely settled moors; I have studied the human race through careful drawings of the unadorned body, and in the urgent and highly technological realm of hospitals. Perhaps that is why, in my multimedia sculptures, there is no line between the “natural” and the “artificial”. At some level, everything we see around us is a result of imagination, and what could be more natural than imagination?

Artist’s Statement

There is beauty, obvious or hidden, in every creature and every object. When this beauty speaks to me, I find myself sculpting with odd and diverse materials – plant and animal skins, artifacts of consumerism, skeletons of metal and bone, books, and sometimes even paint on canvas.