Perpetual Distance

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Mackenzie Award in Painting — Honourable Mention

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Game Night 2025

12 x 12″ Acrylic on cradled wood panel

                  I selected this piece for the Grad Show because I felt it best represented the direction I’d like to go with my painting practice. Within the confines of a course, it’s rare I find the freedom to dedicate so much time and detail to such a small painting. This is how I tend to prefer to work. These objects are objects that I live with, and hold rich history. My work is sentimental and usually light-hearted. This piece speaks to the joy that these objects have brought me. Various dice accumulated from various decades, and a playing card. I’ve always been enraptured by the art on playing cards; I find them so beautiful. To me, this piece is about intimate community – the people you connect with  through a fun game or two. I find my work most successful when it communicates the beauty I see in these mundane objects.

Additional Work

Shelf Life 2025

15 x 15″ Acrylic on canvas

Another catalogue of objects, these piece highlights the strange combination of memorabilia that might arise after years of collecting. A play on historical still life, this piece romanticizes the mundane instead of the luxurious. Depicted here (from left to right) are: a bottle my sister brought back from Japan, a liquor bottle I kept from a wedding, a liquor bottle an old coworker gave me, a vintage 7up bottle I bought at an antiques store, an urn containing my cat’s ashes, and a porcelain egg I bought from a different antiques store. No doubt, a strange and intriguing combination of items. I think this topic could also use some iterations.     

These shirt studies were my amateurish foray into the world of wearable art. These piece is first and foremost, concerned with materiality – how different colours and materials overlap and interact, and the various iconographies of clothing itself. I was thinking about the labour tied to the fashion industry, and pushing back against the desire to keep buying, keep consuming. These clothes were second-hand to begin with, but they lay dormant in drawers for too long, until this project. I wanted to breathe new life into them. 

This piece was a response to a psychoanalysis based course I’d recently taken.  Sinking into those teachings, living in the Lacanian idea that the “real” is a plane that cannot be accurately represented, sent me to this place where I felt as though any attempt to make a figurative work would be unsuccessful. How could I claim to have a monopoly on the real? How dare I position myself as someone capable of doing the impossible? It all felt incredibly futile.  This was the piece that was born of that desperation. This is a depiction of what I imagine the realm of the unconscious might look like. The cracked teapot serving as a fallback, a metaphor, some way to cling to something recognizable in the flurried mess of your own mind.    

Previous Work (2024)

Mind Collage of Past and Present 2024

16 x 20″ ink, water colour, pencil crayon on paper board

In this piece I wanted to explore techniques of collage and get out of my comfort zone in terms of composition. Much of my past work tends to situate itself in a physical space, and I wanted to move away from that and create a space that is more conceptual – although it ended up being more of a collage. This mash of sentimental objects and memorabilia is a collection of things that are very important to me, and evoke various personal histories and experiences. While these things are specific to me, my goal is that the viewers of this piece recognize these objects and relate their own personal experiences to them. While this piece is very much a self-portrait, I want it to include the viewer, as their eye moves around the piece, discovering as well as relating to the objects. While this piece was coming together it made me think of those I SPY books that had pages filled with random objects – a puzzle for the viewer to mull over. I used these objects as conduits to represent my memories.

Momentary Companionship 2024

7 x 9″ Ink, paper, embroidery, cloth, found ceramic frame

I’ve always been drawn more to art making that involves a long and laborious process, resulting in something that visually holds the hours put into the piece. Usually, that ends up being some sort of realism with something like pen or graphite. I’d been playing with the idea of working with fabric, and thought back to my textiles class I took in Australia. That class taught me a lot about the histories of textile work and allowed me to explore that medium in a new way. During this time I’d been reminiscing about my recent time spent in Australia on my exchange semester, and still hadn’t really begun to unravel what that time did for me as a person – how it’s changed my art practice and how I see the world. This piece was my attempt at starting to figure that out. The themes of memory and nostalgia are integral to this piece, playing with the visual plane and the distance I feel between the people and places of my past. The cloth on which the piece rests is a piece of scrap I found in the bin during my relief printing class in Australia. I thought it looked so beautiful, I was compelled to take it with me. I tend hold on to whatever I can.

This piece is one in a series of 5 depictions I made of the Cambie bridge.  Stylistically, it was a bit out of my comfort zone, but as I’m sure is already obvious, I tend not to stick with one thing for very long.  I have dreams of continuing this style of work with various locations all over the Lower Mainland.

Untitled (Sampler) 2024

13 x 18″ Thread on Aida cloth

                  My first official cross-stitch project, again with the playing card motif. This idea spawned from an ever-growing collection of photos I enjoy accumulating of different jokers depicted from different sets of playing cards. Cross-stitch (and many other material practices) carry the visible weight of labour more than other mediums, and (at least in the past) tend to be overlooked in “fine art” spaces. It is a vibrant and beautiful practice I feel fortunate to be able to take part in.   

Untitled (Mold Tapestry) 2024

13 x 14″ Yarn on mesh base

This tapestry was a collaborative project with my dear friend Maia McHugh.  We were both exchange students in Australia at the time (me being from Port Moody and her being from Doncaster, England) and we shared a textiles class.  Every week we would pass it back and forth until the specimen grew large enough.  Seeing the strange, unpredictable shapes begin to form and have the piece finally come together was so rewarding.  I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to present it as a part of the online show, as it holds the love I got to share with my friends during my short time studying in Australia. I miss it every day.  

Previous Work (2023)

One of my favourite pieces from my time at Emily Carr, this painting’s purpose was to serve as a time capsule, an ambitious attempt to memorialize some of my grandma’s various belongings. Since this painting was completed, that shelf has since vanished, and most of the objects within it have been bestowed upon me. Loosely, these objects exist as themselves. But together, they create connections within themselves, each one informing how one might see the next. This shelf remained nearly identical throughout my entire childhood, and as time moved forward, and I became worried something might change, I knew I needed a way to make it permanent.   

I decided to include this painting in this show because I feel it was successful in a way similar paintings of mine have not been. I believe the success of this painting is in its subtleties, and its mood. I often worry my work won’t speak for itself, but I believe this painting does.

This piece was a departure from my typical “strained detail” method of painting. It has loosened up. Balancing ambiguity with familiarity, I was thinking about mundanity, and moments often overlooked.  Unromantic movements.  Repetitive movements.  The opening of the fridge to reveal an ensemble of unremarkable objects. Recognizable objects that bring comfort, and maybe a twinge of nostalgia.