Featured Speaker In December at Creative Mornings Vancouver

On December 6th I will be the featured speaker at Creative Mornings Vancouver. I am both really excited and extremely terrified about this opportunity because I’ve never done any major public speaking like this before.

It’s an honour to be stepping into the role of speaker as I’ve been attending this event since its launch in Vancouver two years ago. The theme for December is Make, which is a perfect fit for me.

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Please check out my profile and Q&A on the Creative Mornings blog »

Creative Mornings is a monthly speaker series that happens on the first Friday of every month, and features creative people from a wide range of professions. The event is free (but ticketed) and tickets are made available on the Monday before the event.

If you’ve never attended before all of the talks by previous speakers are available online. This is a great resource for inspiration, along the lines of Ted Talks or Pecha Kucha.

Cross your fingers. Wish me luck. Say hi if you happen to attend.

Colours of Autumn

We’ve had an extended run of spectacular fall colours here in Vancouver this year, because it’s been a very dry autumn. Normally the rainy season begins in September or October, and the leaves are washed from the trees before they get the chance to turn.

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It’s really beautiful with all the reds, yellows, and oranges on the trees. I take a zillion photos when I go for my walks during the day.

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Despite the beauty, it worries me. We live in a rain forest, and the dry season seems to extend further into the fall every year and so we get less rain. In the long term it can’t mean anything good.

Eastside Culture Crawl 2013 is Coming!

The 17th Annual Eastside Culture Crawl is just three weeks away, and happens on the weekend of Friday November 15th to Sunday November 17th, 2013. This will be my fourth year participating. It amazes me to realize how much time has passed since my first Crawl experience because it feels less long ago.

ecc-2013-e-invite copyNOPREVIEW info

In addition to the usual Friday to Sunday dates a preview evening has been added on Thursday November 14th, from 6pm to 9pm. Visit the Crawl website for details because not all artists will be participating (myself included).

You can find my page here on the Culture Crawl web site. For those on Facebook I have created an event invitation if you would like to RSVP »

17th Annual Eastside Culture Crawl
Dates: November 15th to 17th, 2013
Time: Fri, 5pm to 10pm | Sat & Sun, 11am to 6pm
My location is E15 on the Culture Crawl map
Address: 1660 East Georgia Street

Work In Progress for If Walls Could Talk

In March of next year I will be creating an installation at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for If Walls Could Talk. This site-specific installation will be a collaboration between myself and Bruce Alcock, the Creative Director of Global Mechanic. Our project is called Canopy and will combine many different elements from yarn drawings, to paper sculptures, along with digital projection, and sound elements.

Work in progress

I began work on this project in September and have been sharing my progress on Instagram. To date I’ve been working on producing multiples of maple leaves cut from white paper, which will be suspended from the ceiling. For once I am not cutting these by hand (because that would be crazy), but instead have been using a digital cutter.

Work in progress

Work in progress

The ceiling in my apartment has been the stand-in space for my explorations in how to assemble and suspend the leaf clusters from the ceiling. The leaves are cut individually, and then fitted together during hanging. It looks beautiful.

A variation of this same process has been to come up with a composition of paper wings that will eventually evolve into a lantern. The image here is of a small hand-cut rough I did to mock up the idea.

Work in progress

I eventually created larger more refined wing shapes for the digital cutter to produce, and assembled these in a similar fashion to the maple leaf clusters. The bottom image is of a prototype I mocked up and is hanging in my dining room so I can contemplate its further development.

Work in progress

Work in progress

This project is very different than anything I’ve worked on previously. I sometimes find the scale of it staggering, because there are a long list of elements that still need to be made. It’s also been a bit weird working on something with a long term production schedule, versus the short term gratification of small projects I am used to.

Triangulating Paper Cut Sculpture

I was preparing some work for a gallery proposal last week and I came across these photos of a paper cut sculpture I completed over the summer. The piece was shown during my solo show at the Ranger Station gallery in July, but I’d forgotten to share it elsewhere. This is the largest paper cut sculpture I have created to date, with its longest side at 18 inches.

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paper cut sculpture-2

This is a larger version of a prototype I made in early spring. It’s about four times the size of the original piece and I was curious to see how the same structure would hold up in a larger size. It sags when I stand it up on the smallest side so my goal is to create something in order to balance it on the top corner of the triangle. It’s more beautiful when balanced in this way.

paper cut sculpture

paper cut sculpture

After all these months I’m just getting back to making paper cut sculptures, and completed a new one this week. I’ll share it once I get around to photographing it properly.

Hot Talks @ Hot Art Wet City with Earnest Ice Cream

For our October Hot Talks session we have two speakers for the price of one. Ben Ernst and Erica Bernardi are the founders and co-owners of Earnest Ice Cream, and they will be sharing the story behind the start up of their small business.

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Small Business as a Platform for Change: Adventures of an Ice Cream Startup

Ben and Erica are co-owners of Earnest Ice Cream, creating small batch artisanal ice cream for Vancouverites. Earnest Ice Cream started in June 2012, with the two of them peddling their frozen treats to farmers markets throughout the city. The business has now grown to a scoop shop on Fraser, nine employees, and wholesale accounts throughout the city.

Read the full description of Ben and Erica’s talk here.

Come Join us for the latest Hot Talk on Tuesday October 29th at 7pm. Tickets are by donation and are available for purchase through Eventbrite.

Hot Talks: Earnest Ice Cream
Hot Art Wet City
Date: October 29th, 2013
Time: Doors 6:30, talk 7pm
Address: 2206 Main Street, Vancouver

Revisiting Clarion Alley in San Francisco

My previous visit to San Francisco was in October 2007, and one of the highlights of that visit was walking through Clarion Alley. So of course I needed to see it again on this trip.

The alley is small but is filled with art from end to end thanks to the Clarion Alley mural project, which has been on-going for about twenty years. There is a good mix of styles and subject matter in the work, and I was interested to see a few pieces still there after all this time.

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

Wandering the streets of San Francisco

The full set of photos I took on both visits to Clarion Alley can be found on Flickr.

Laser Cut Commission: Earnest Ice Cream

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I am pleased to present this recent commission I completed last week for Earnest Ice Cream. The piece was installed in the shop last Saturday morning and will be on permanent display.

Ben and Erica reached out to me over the summer about creating artwork for their new scoop shop that opened on Fraser Street in August. As our discussions began about what sort of work they wanted for the shop I had just done the first experiment of translating my paper cut designs into laser cut wood, and this is what they chose to go with.

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Laser cut commission-8

Because their budget was limited we chose the design from existing paper cut work, which you can see in my portfolio. From there I scanned the work in two pieces (because it was too large for the scanner), then assembled and cleaned it up in Photoshop.

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Laser cut commission-5

The most involved bit of work in this process was creating a clean outline of the design using Illustrator. I don’t have a lot of experience using this software so my friend Kirsti kindly gave me a crash course in what I needed to know. I used the trace function to create the outline but it was hours (and hours) of tedious work to clean it up into something usable.

This is a key step because the laser cutter works with vector files, and the cleaner the outline, the better the final product.

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Laser cut commission-2

The finished piece is cut from bamboo plywood, and was fabricated by Hopewell Works Ltd. This is a laser cutting and engraving fabrication studio, located right in my neighbourhood, and I was referred to by Derek of Laser Cutter Cafe. The people at Hopewell Works really know their stuff, and it was great to work with them.

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Laser cut commission

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It was a huge learning curve to figure out how to make this piece, and I could not have done it without the help of Boris, Arnt, Val, and Kirsti. Each one of them shared their knowledge with me, or lent a hand in some essential way.

A Visit to the de Young Museum

I wrote briefly about Ruth Asawa’s work because it is so arresting and inspiring, but there were many other amazing works I saw on my visit to the de Young Museum. I went up to the ninth floor of the look out tower to check out the 360 degree view of San Francisco, and from there made my way through the many galleries showcasing the permanent collection.

A visit to the de Young Museum

The de Young is a fine arts museum with objects from a wide variety of cultures. What I’m sharing here are some of the pieces I found the most interesting. It’ll give you an idea of how varied the collection actually is.

A visit to the de Young Museum
Intricate rattan sculpture by Honda Syoryu.

A visit to the de Young Museum
Blown glass sculpture by William Morris.

A visit to the de Young Museum
Cast glass portrait by Nicholas Africano

A visit to the de Young Museum
Maker unknown but this is from their collection of New Guinea art.

A visit to the de Young Museum
Maker unknown, from the collection of the Americas.

A visit to the de Young Museum
The Blue Veil by Edmund Charles Tarbell.

A visit to the de Young Museum
A visit to the de Young Museum
Installation by Cornelia Parker.

On the outside of the museum there is a small sculpture garden with a site specific work by James Turrell, called Three Gems. I remember it well from my previous visit because entering into feels like stepping into another world, but with a clear view of a familiar sky.

A visit to the de Young Museum-3

A visit to the de Young Museum

I count the de Young amongst the favourite museums I’ve visited around the world, because it never fails to inspire me.

Inspiration: Sculpture by Ruth Asawa

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Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few leisurely days wandering the streets of San Francisco while Boris was there for a conference. The weather was gorgeous, still in the throws of late summer warmth and the bluest of blue skies.

My very first stop (after a hearty breakfast) was to visit the de Young Museum in Golden Gate park. The building is amazing and I love their permanent collection, but my favourite work is by Ruth Asawa.

Ruth Asawa sculpture

Ruth Asawa sculpture-3

Ruth Asawa is best known for her crocheted and tied wire sculptures, but also has numerous public art pieces located around San Francisco. She passed away in August of this year.

All of the sculptures pictured here are part of the permanent collection at the de Young Museum, and are located in the ground floor lobby of the observation tower.

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Ruth Asawa sculpture-7

Revisiting these sculptures six years after my previous visit to SF and I feel even more inspired by Ruth Asawa’s work than the first time. They feel so relevant to my current body of works in paper. It is the shadows these cast as much as the sculptures themselves that get to me because this is what I want to achieve with my sculptural paper cut work.

More photos from San Francisco coming soon.