STATEMENT
There is a paradox between the beauty of death and the fear of dying. My work lives in that tension. I make sculptural paintings that feel like beings, like something standing in the room with you.
I am drawn to the strange beauty of things falling apart. My surfaces evolve and crumble, like a skin that has been shed or a memory in flux. Using oil, beeswax, clay, pigment, and found objects, I build layered ecosystems that evoke both decay and renewal. My work explores mortality, compulsive behaviors, and belief systems shaped by trauma. I create spaces where pain and beauty can coexist without resolution. They are gentle bad dreams and blinding ecstasies.
My work emerges from a longing to reconnect with the inner child's profound sensitivity. They build textured, emotional worlds that hold grief, memory, and transformation. They are places where the wreckage of life becomes touchable, where joy and pain can coexist without needing to be explained.
At the age of 21, I survived a violent home invasion that left lasting trauma. My art practice became not only an outlet but a grounding mechanism when flashbacks and fear overtook my body. Through non-traditional healing practices and ceremonial work, I developed what I term trauma-as-creative-intelligence - a methodology that transforms accumulated survival knowledge into artistic practice rather than treating trauma as damage to overcome.
Central to my methodology is what I term "somatic archaeology": the process of excavating and uncovering layers of experience held in the body. In this work, I use this archaeological process through acts of building up and excavating. Whether working with paint, gesture, or dimensional materials, I aim to physically enact the same process: building up layers of embodied experience, then excavating through them to reveal understanding. The visible scars that remain from this process become integral artifacts of body knowledge made tangible.
My process involves making offerings to materials, asking permission before working with them. Each offering begins with gratitude for what the materials will teach through collaboration. Objects and materials communicate their own intelligence once awakened through touch and intention, creating collaborative dialogue that guides the work's development.
I founded and built CUFO Arts, an artist residency outside Montreal focused on Indigenous and underrepresented artists, acquiring the land through grants and constructing much of the space myself. I view the creation of conscious, inclusive spaces as a direct extension of my visual practice - both involve building beings that can hold transformation.
For me, art is a way of staying human. A way of feeling everything - blooming and decaying, all at once. My work asks viewers to stay with what cannot be named, to meet these beings without needing to solve them. Each piece becomes a testament that our wounds can become our gifts, that what breaks us can also teach us to sing. In the studio, nothing needs to be perfect. It is simply where something broken gets rearranged until it transforms.