Bio
Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, I trained in drawing, painting, and printmaking through the McMaster University Studio Art Program, while studying for my degree in Arts & Science. After earning a master’s degree in history of medicine at McGill University, Montreal, I moved to England, where I lived for five wonderful years. At the University of Oxford, I earned another master’s and a doctorate in art history. Inspired by the discovery of some curious prints of birds found at a local shop, my dissertation focused on the life and career of the British artist, Francis Barlow (1622-1704). Since 2014, I have served as curator and museum administrator at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, where I am currently Head of Publications. A passion for art history not only inspires my use of traditional sources and media; it propels me to re-envisage age-old artistic themes. Thank you for visiting.
Artist Statement
In short, my art registers my experience of the world. It reflects the search for, and expression of my identity—something that is at once found within, but also shaped across time by our experiences, and by our relationships with people, places, and things. I have always been curious. From a young age, curiosity made me ask questions, and, at the same time, along with a predilection for history and a fascination for “old things,” curiosity drove me to collect: fossils, rocks, coins, stamps, books, pictures, furniture. I have also always loved to draw and write, so I suppose I am a collector of images and words as well. Finally, I have always loved to share and explain my findings—hence, my passion for teaching.
All of these loves can be found in my work. My drawings and prints are meditations on the human relationship with the natural world, dreams about what lies just beneath the surface of a body or a landscape, reflections on connections with others—ranging from the most intimate communion possible between the oldest of friends or lovers, to the most isolating deprivation, and potential for the destruction of life, on the other.
I am a printmaker. I see printmaking as the ultimate art form because it subsumes and combines all of the others: sculpture, painting, drawing, and even now finds new and infinite possibilities in the realms of digital photography and media. I love ink and I love making marks and impressions upon paper, whether they form images or words. I have kept a succession of sketchbooks-cum-journals. These contain the catalogue of all that I have collected and serve as a resource for my works.
With a series of interconnected forms abstracted from life: bodies, vessels, branches, roots, stones, and figures, and stars—a visual language that I have developed over the last two decades—I construct landscapes that pulsate and celebrate life, or else speak to its threat and demise. Pervading my works is the idea that although life is fleeting and finite, new life can and often does emerge out of death.
My most recent works, “Brasses,” are inspired by medieval funerary brasses and the rubbings made after them. Meditating on the entombment of ancestral figures, these mixed-media prints imagine that the bodies of the buried are still intact like their brass effigies—living, though sealed underground. The technique befits the subject. I start with a basic etching or underdrawing, which outlines the figures. Wax is then heavily rubbed over sections of the sheet. I use the etching needle to partially excavate the figures beneath. To add detail, wire meshes and small metal objects are pressed or hammered into sections of the waxed surface. Black ink is then liberally washed over sections of the sheet so that it infiltrates the exposed paper and fills the patterns created by the object impressions (the results of this step are quite unpredictable and exciting). The overall surface is then lightly blotted and buffed, carefully preserving the residual wax and the detail it carries. Further details are picked out with the needle and ink is added as needed.
I am now planning a series of “Brasses” on a larger scale. These will incorporate multi-plate etchings with new drawings, image transfers of older drawings, and collagraphs using found objects and materials to make up the figures to be excavated. I connect the physical act of recovering the printed/underdrawn figures with what I also do as historian, writer, and curator: making the unseen or forgotten once more visible—or making the dead live again.