Artist Statement
I have always been intrigued by boundaries, real or imagined. Over the last four decades, I’ve looked at many different types of borders: between languages, between mother and daughter, between public and private. Rooted in personal experience, my work strives to take these emotional spaces and give them physical form on the canvas and screen.
As a young artist in Quebec, I was particularly influenced by the way language in the city served to both define and isolate. Some of my earliest pieces, Family Album and Metro Album, explored this through a series of bound original drawings, silkscreens and prints. My aim was to find the hidden story in old photographs, articulating the distances between characters and objects, and imagining the words and relationships that filled those expanses.
In the late 1970s, I began experimenting with the emerging medium of video. I saw it as an ideal form for exploring feminist ideals, family relationships, and technology’s impact on both. Eventually, I created a series of videos that were broadcast on cable television from 1978-79. Subjects ranged from performance pieces with fellow artists to examinations of nationality via the whimsical persona of Miss Canada, to in-depth conversations with my mother. Throughout, I tried to push the edge of what would otherwise be considered private into public space.
A desire to return to a simpler medium than early video’s production-heavy demands shifted my focus to painting and drawing in oil and pastels in the 1980s. I was also inspired by a move to Red Hook, Brooklyn, and wanted to capture the intensity of that landscape: its language, violence, local characters and community. At the same time, I was examining a different kind of geography—that of domesticity and the interior landscape of motherhood, nostalgia and home.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Canada’s Prince Edward Island became my muse, and I sought to reflect its lyrical, curvilinear forms through collage and drawing. I also started teaching art to New York City public school children, and watching their pure joy in cutting, glueing and drawing led me to re-experience my own delight in the fundamentals of art-making. My work became grounded in an increasingly meditative practice, centered on the materials themselves, as I created more reflective, textural pieces.
In recent years, I have begun to re-examine the blurring of public and private spaces through new technologies with my Home Page series. These scanned prints and altered photographs are built around emails to myself and drawings done over these texts. I remain fascinated by the idea of turning an ephemeral and highly personal moment into a more permanent, public work.