My practice is split between creating production jewellery and creating sculptural works that combine paint and metal. 

I am deeply inspired by the landscape of the place where I live: Nova Scotia. Living near the ocean affects me greatly, and provides me with a lot of mental clarity that helps to inform my work. I am inspired by people who take risks to explore and pursue what excites them. I find that the energy of people who relentlessly push towards honing a skill or who can follow an obsession without inhibition to be so inspiring! It fuels me with the drive to constantly expand and grow, and be curious. I also think a lot about memory, and in particular, how we remember places. Lately, I’ve been really interested in exploring the use of visual mementos to preserve memory. 

If I’m not at my jewellery bench, I’m probably outside! I love spending time outdoors, whether it’s walking my dog around the neighbourhood, or out exploring a coastal trail. I’m also really into long distance running, and get out almost daily for an early morning run. Facilitating art classes for youth is something I have dabbled in a bit this past year, and plan to pursue further in the new year. I think it’s really important to help guide children and teens to develop tools to explore their creative notions of identity through art. 

I think the favourite piece I’ve made is a big floral wall piece made of painted copper called There All Along. It was an incredibly challenging piece for me on many levels. I kind of let this piece evolve as I was making it, which is something I don’t often do– I usually have a clear plan before undertaking any large sculptural work. Although technically challenging, the evolution for this piece felt really intuitive. I used probably about 100 rivets to mount all the components– the last rivet was so satisfying! 

Exploratory

I find it really exciting to see so much experimentation happening in the Canadian art jewellery scene! Innovative exploration of a wide range of non-traditional jewellery materials and techniques seems increasingly prevalent. There also seems to be a pretty fearless move towards exploring the potential role of jewellery in today’s culture to carve out space to pose pertinent and critical questions. 

I’m very excited to be part of an exhibition next year called Paysage de l’intime that will be part of the Design TO Festival in January. It will travel afterwards to a couple other venues in Canada, and eventually to Paris, where it will be part of Parcours Bijoux 2020. I’m also going to be teaching a workshop at an international craft conference being held in Bonavista, NL in October 2020. The workshop will focus on the use of paint on metal to create sculptural objects that serve as mementos of place. I’ve been focusing a lot lately on my silver production jewellery line, but I hope to have the time to do a bit more sculpture work in the coming year.