Art is way back into myself. To express the inner world. To feel the vitality, the aliveness, the risk, the comedy. When I have been away from art making it shows up as a haunting feeling of something I once did.
Art has a funny way of seeming really important, like I am connecting with spirits, dead painters and in communion with something very deep inside me and other times, it can feel silly, frivolous and there are more important things to be doing. I think I have felt the latter for a long time. A lot of stuff happens to you in becoming a woman. Assaults, inappropriate touch, peer pressure, hatred, all the things that are being written about now, drove me, in my 20s and 30s to do work around injustices to women in systemic vulnerability. I started working in shelters and prisons and created women collectives by making zines and films to politicize the personal. I continued to work in the field and studied psychology to work with trauma survivors.
I have always made art. I used to do art performances for a time in Montreal. Later I did almost everything collectively, played in a band, made films, did art installations, performances. It felt more like survival, like an act that just had to come out, a playful release from the intense work I was doing. All of these had deep meaning for me but I wasn’t ambitious or following the codes of how to be a successful artist. I didn’t even call myself an artist, I didn’t insert myself or claim anything. I gave it all away. It was a release, a way of channeling and losing myself, a full; abandonment into the wild expression of the ether.
Then I had kids and mothering became art. Kids dance, play, make, it was beautiful. We created. I also was tending to the needs of others, their pain and sometimes you can get further away from your own. I think as women we are trained for this. I am on that shoal tending to sea pups and have forgotten my own flesh – how cold I am, the salt on the skin, the exhaustion. This is what happens to women. We easily lose ourselves and become a vessel for others. When I meet a woman who doesn’t have this tendency, I take in there self-possession, their understanding of themselves. This is what I am working towards. I like to believe that when I reflect my inner world, other women will too.
Drawing, watercolour and painting were more adaptive in the late hours of the evening after the kids went to sleep. So I spent a lot of time in mediums that were accessible. I also work in collage, and found images, I like those old images, the call out to be altered. I listen to music. I pump myself up, get adrenaline going, energy to take risk, to feel freedom, to let go.
Some people like to go to a studio and schedule regular hours. I don’t work that way. I like to be surrounded by my art, see it up on the walls and have it talk back to me at different times of the day. I notice things that help me build my iconography. It suits me better. I don’t have a routine, I just fit things around each other and let it all hang out. Uninterrupted, pieces overlapping with each other. I want to be reminded all the time - I make art, this is what I do. Don’t stop.