The In Situ arts festival in late October was an extraordinary experience for me as an artist and a fun one in general.

With two large scale pieces in the main space and an entire room installation (allowing plenty of space for dancers to perform in), it was wonderful to stretch out (mentally and physically) into so much space.

The intensity required to conceive and execute so much in so little time is not sustainable for long (by me at least) but has some benefits. As I was just describing to a friend, it kept the threads of my thoughts white-hot, so every hour of work built 100% onto the previous hours, days and weeks of work – since most other distractions had been put aside... even sleep!

As well, working with the festival's fabulous lighting designer Joe Pagnan and working with light in the drawers and other components of my room installation 'Containment', has forever changed my thinking around light.

The incredible support and enthusiasm of Heather Snell, director/artistic director of the festival, and her wonderful husband Ken, was fertile ground in which to grow (thank you both!).

While I had nothing like enough time to get ready (in fact I am still trying to recover from the 24/7 preparations) but the joyful, creative and expansive experience that this was, coupled with the new work I produced for it, means I am glad and grateful for the opportunity.

And I still love that gorgeous, decrepit building!

Thanks to all who visited! For any who could not, I hope these photos will go some way toward compensating.

For the past several weeks I have been working on a new, ambitious installation for In Situ, an event I wrote about in more detail here (click to open).

What I want to focus on in this post is the relationship between artworks and their space, in a deeper sense than "does this painting go with my couch?"

I leapt at the chance to be part of In Situ even though it would cost me money I don't have, even though there was not enough time to prepare, all because of the space!

​Soaring ceilings, tiny welder's booths, classic windows, exposed pipes, industrial fixtures, peeling paint... what's not to love?

The Small Arms Building is a wonderful network of spaces in a gorgeous state of neglect, the perfect location to stage artworks (not just visual but also performance-based) that relate to this remarkable, untamed space.

As an artist working on projects in an imaginative-but-real world, I wear a number of hats. I put a couple on right away when first touring the space: the Practical Hat (the one that wants me to sleep 8 hours every night, not get up to my eyeballs in debt, see my friends and family more often and regularly, eat well and work out, you know the one) – it thinks about what work I already have that could work in this space; the Dreamer Hat looks at the vast potential of all the spaces in the building and imagines a fantastic array of mostly-impossible (for me in these circumstances at least) ways to transform them and create remarkable experiences.

I am grateful to both Hats: one for keeping me alive (more or less, depending!); the other for enticing me to stretch and attempt things that while less-than-sensible have been glorious to thinking about, to see realized, to watch people interact with and to talk with some of them about.

The photo above shows the space that will be all mine (insert evil laugh here). The room is 20ft by 50ft. A dance performance and its audience will need a pathway through it to the next room, but allowing for that I can do what I want!

At right (I hope it's that way for mobile users as well) is a shot showing a fraction of the drawers I have collected or had set aside for me so I can build my main new sculpture. I won't really know until they are in the space how many I will need, which is part of the fun (and also part of what tells me I have fully transitioned to being an artist now, as my designer self would have wanted to control every detail in advance!). 

In addition to drawers and boxes, I will be working with a lot of photo-digital image transfers, plexiglass and light. This work's roots are my 'Boxed In' figure drawings from 2010 and it will connect up to all of the 'Subject to Limitation' thematic work since.

I will be showing a few existing pieces, one reconfigured specifically for the space it will be in (not pictured here). One of the others has only been shown in BC back in 2012: "Turbulence" a 21ft long photo-digital mixed media piece comprised of six angled panels that will be hung high and look down on the people below. It should suit the main space very well!

So in answer to the question posed in the title of this post: both. I've had the idea for the drawers portion of the main sculpture piece for a few years now but other aspects of the installation that it will be part of were inspired by the context. Also the actual configuration and some of the details of the sculpture are responses to the space and particularities of the event.

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I sing. Alone in my car. Oh, sometimes my husband’s there too. 

I used to sing a lot: in choirs, while walking along quiet streets, at friends’ houses, in Girl Guides, around campfires, in the elevator of the apartment building where I once lived… all over 30 years ago!

So this summer I had a free week in Haliburton and the chance to take a course at the HSA+D instructors’ discounted rate while my husband Kal taught collage there (I had taught the previous week). I thought about taking his course, it was a chance to focus on a medium I only lightly touch on in my own work and guaranteed to be fun as well.

So why didn’t I? 

As my regular students can attest, there is a quirk in my nature that means I will move along methodically for a while and then what I call my “randomizer switch” will kick on and I’ll find myself talking about or teaching or doing something unexpected, not quite sensible, but sometimes just the perfect deviation!

That’s how I found myself a student in Creative Choral Music I, taught by the magnificent Sherry Squires (far left in photo).

There was also a level II choir, taught by Andy Rush (an amazing man who could make a high impact aerobics workout video just based on his conducting!). Our two classes came together the first (Monday) afternoon, as we would do throughout the week to prepare for our concerts and to celebrate at the end.

I was in skilled and capable hands, and there’s safety in numbers, right? (Imagine me laughing, so hard that tears are probably coming to my eyes!)

Well, the first part was actually true, Sherry and Andy were terrific instructors. It is also true that we covered a LOT of content in a few short days: warm-ups, voice management, enunciation, reading music, rhythms, breathing, blending, following a conductor, recognizing cues, coming in on time (surprisingly hard not to be early or especially, late), holding music, engaging the audience, being onstage, sight-reading (rather difficult for those who like me don’t properly read music for voice!), an amazingly large and varied selection of songs, etc.

What I discovered, and experienced, was how much my brain had to juggle more or less simultaneously when I wasn’t used to doing any of it! Even singing: it’s entirely different to sing a melody solo, in a key that’s perfect for your voice, (and do whatever you like to it with no consideration for anyone else, because there is no one else to consider) than it is to sing as one small part of a whole having only just been introduced to a song, and (and it’s a big “and”) sing a harmony part.

Singing a harmony part (I was in the tenor section) was a sometimes bizarre experience because depending on the song/arrangement, it might relate closely to the melody or it might be off on what feels like a completely different tangent. All contributing to making a wonderful whole of course, but difficult to process and adapt to (never mind learn well enough to get right consistently!) in a few short days.

In my studio I am used to working solo almost all the time. I have had a number of projects where for certain periods a variety of truly generous people have helped me out, and I’ve also hired fabricators and services to complete certain aspects, but even those cooperative experiences were very different than singing in a choir.

A few short days can get you surprisingly far in the right circumstances, including the right instructor(s), and to feel our 50+ voices blend into a unified whole during sections of both concerts was pure bliss. I felt like one small star in a galaxy of stars – an amazing reward for almost a week of head-exploding mental challenge, voice-shredding physical challenge and moments of pure panic!

The other reward was all the warm, friendly, welcoming veterans (and not) whom I met in both choirs, and I didn't even meet everyone! 

It was not easy being a real beginner again, to leap straight into the deep end, especially when you are expert at other things, but it is vital. It quite literally adds to your vitality, stimulating and nourishing you all at once; and by exercising "muscles" that you don't normally use or aren't skillful with, you increase your mental and creative agility, possibilities and courage.

That fantastic week prepared me for new creative adventures this fall and beyond, but more on those later!

Please share in the comments below any leaps (large or small) that you’ve taken and were glad you did... or if you too sing in a choir. 

The combined choirs of Choral Music I and II, led by Sherry Squires and Andy Rush respectively (far left and middle front). Yours truly is partially hidden behind the white hair of one of my fellow female tenors, top left. This picture was taken right after our concert in the Great Hall at Haliburton School of Art + Design.

Here's a little video excerpt of Choral Music I and II classes' concert, singing one verse of Susan Aglukark's Song of the Land. The cameraman sneezes at one point I think :-)

It's a magical thing to watch a highly skilled or master craftsperson do their thing.

There is also something inherently magical about any of the spinning crafts, such as a potter's wheel or as in this case a wood lathe.

I came across this video and enjoyed it so much I thought I'd share it with you.

The craftsman is making traditional Japanese Kokeshi dolls, both fashioning the wood (I love how he connects the head to the body!) and painting the dolls with clean, deft strokes.

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If you're wondering why I have fallen behind in my usually weekly blog posts, I have been away, both teaching and learning.

​I'm hard at work on some new blog posts, including a series about stepping outside of your comfort zone, which I hope you will enjoy – please re-visit my blog later this week and check them out!

It was a busy and fun weekend in Port Credit (Mississauga) on June 18 and 19 at Art-Spread where I was one of over a dozen artists/artisans showing and demonstrating what I do. 

Lots of people I know came to visit (only one had ever seen the scrolls live before), and if you were one of them, thank you.

Above is a wonderful TED Talk on the power and importance of disruption in creative work, with some amazing and famous examples (i.e. the resulting work is famous, the fact that disruption made them possible isn't). This is in fact the source for my title “Play the Unplayable Piano”.

Watching the video will be 15 well-spent minutes of your life – how much of our life on the internet can we say that about? 

​It makes me wonder if I should show it at the beginning of all of my courses – might be a good way to warm up creative thinking and help prevent the instinctive resistance that can arise when I introduce something new. 

Disruptors are an important factor in how I work as an artist as well as how I teach although I've usually referred to the “randomizer” in my brain. A better name for it is “disruptor” since that expresses its effect as well as its role.

​How has it shown up in my studio? How do I even choose instances?

​There was the time I decided to take on my least-liked colour, so I kept working with pink until I stopped disliking it. Pink functioned as a disrupter in every painting I put it in, until it became just another colour in my palette.
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Or the time I decided to work with a brush that had hardened, caked-on paint, instead of throwing it out, then made the best paintings of my life to that point.

To be more creative, introduce something that disrupts your familiar.



​Disruption is uncomfortable,   even excruciating, at first, because the things that make us           comfortable are familiar.

Top: video of Tim Harford's TED Talk on How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative. Above left and right: Over and Over and Chair with Swatch #1; both examples of work that included disruption as part of their process.

Every residency or workshop I have taken has disrupted my normal practice, sometimes enormously, especially when being far from home was combined with a really powerful mentoring situation.

More often I am inclined to take on things I don't know how to do as aspects of a project where I do know how to do other parts. Like last summer's charcoal figure drawing mural at the Art Gallery of Mississauga; or the chairs I am working on now.

My first efforts to use fluorescent colour was a powerful disrupter, both challenging and fun. When I introduced it in a class I was teaching, I got the full range of responses: from those who giggled with amazement at being completely out of their comfort zones and delighted disbelief at what they were producing, to one who refused to try even a drop, and of course everyone in between.

​There are a couple of things about disrupters that we need to remember, whether they are an old friend or a scary stranger: they make us far more creative as we struggle to adapt to them, discover new things because of them, and they are uncomfortable! They may even feel excruciating at first, but that's natural, because the things that make us comfortable are familiar.

The decorative knots you see here were made years ago when I was too sick to do much of anything, even, most of the time, to make simple things, but I longed to, and every now and then I had a day when I could break through the thick, dense fog of illness to actually make something. Like these knots. 

I found these while going through stuff in my studio, trying to make space.

There's no practical reason to keep these, but they tug at me and remind me how far I've come, what a gift it is to be well.

They also remind me how powerful that urge to make is in many of us. Making time for it helps us become ourselves again.

Creativity is essentially about making unexpected connections. Working in mixed media is very stimulating precisely because it expands the opportunity for forming new connections, especially in contemporary approaches where the options for ingredients has cracked wide open.

Stitchery, whether as sewing, embroidery, needlepoint, cross-stitch or other needle arts, has taken on particular importance in recent years. Late great Canadian artist Joyce Wieland (one of my heroes) was a pioneer in bringing traditional women's arts, such as sewing and quilting for example, into "real" art, i.e. the kind that gets shown in galleries and museums.

Below is a work-in-progress I've scanned in, where I'm drawing-by-embroidering onto a close-up photo of mine of an old, rusty lawnmower.

​What interesting media combinations have you seen somewhere or tried yourself?