She Tried to Catch Tickles

Catching Joy is a themed exhibit opening Sept.11 - 30 at Neilson Park Creative Centre.

Artists were given a line or two from the book, Joy by Corinne Averiss, and asked to create an artwork based on them.

My lines were, "She tried to catch chuckles. Then she tried to catch tickles." I had a lot of fun thinking about the visual imagery conjured up by the words and the overall theme of the book. This piece is 28"x11" and 8"high. The spirals are becoming my specialty...

 Pop-Up Accordion Book Workshop

Timed and designed to beat the Winter Doldrums - a Pop-Up Workshop! Make something to make you happy - join me at Neilson Park Creative Centre for two days of making paper pop-ups collected into an Accordion Book. Saturday and Sunday, February 24 & 25. Check it out here. 

Small Things

I set myself a small project a few nights ago that I completed in an evening. 

A couple of weeks ago I was showing my work to a book artist, who in turn showed me her work. She told me that her time was at a premium, so when she wanted to make something, it had to be done within a couple of hours. I put off projects because I start thinking everything has to be epic - but nothing gets done unless I have loads of spare time - which I don't! So I took inspiration from the 'quick and dirty' method - 2 hours and it's done. There's a lot to be said for making fast artistic decisions and using what materials are at hand. It's also a really great way of using up some of those beautiful scraps that I can't bear to throw out. And at the end, it's so much more satisfying to have a little concertina popup book in hand, than to say I binge-watched yet another series of detective shows on Netflix...

Student Work

This March, I was invited to teach a five-day PopUp workshop at Cawthra Park Secondary School with Grade 9 and 10 Visual Arts students. I worked with them last year, too, and I have to say that they're an awesome group of people to work with! They take what I teach them and run with it. We used coloured paper to make concertina books with end boards. Every day I showed them a different kind of paper-engineering device. Their themes were Figures, Heroes, and Space (inner or outer). I didn't see the finished books until I was invited to the Spring Artfest - an annual showcase of student work. Their books just blew me away - so many creative ways of exploring the given themes and such a high level of skill and talent. Each book different - playing with a variety of colour schemes, delicate hand-cut designs, humour, inventive engineering - they humble me. Above are just a few samples of the students' work, to give you an idea of how well the books turned out. 

Results like this make it all worthwhile!