A Contemporary Format for a Non-Traditional Artist’s Biography and Practice

In 2013-2016, I started taking on-line rug hooking courses from Deanne Fitzpatrick, one of Canada’s master rug hookers.  As well, I attended Marina Lesar’s hook-ins in Caledon Ontario. I built up a stash of wools and yarns, built a tree house studio on the third floor of our 100+year old Victorian semi, and furnished it with rug hooking equipment. From 2013-2017 I practiced my skills until my own style and ideas started to emerge.

In 2018, I paired with the Royal Society of Astronomy to hang several of my South Pole Project (see ART pages in this website) in a show entitled Out of This World. I also wrote an article published in R.U.G. Hooking Magazine (2019). This was my first venture into melding my interests in Science, data, and space into the rug hooking medium. Later that year, using my iPad to crop and manipulate J.E.H. McDonald’s painting Forest Wilderness  until the abstactions were just shapes and colours. This project, Revisting the Group of Seven, became seven rugs and  a  magazine article published in R.U.G. Hooking magazine in 2020. These pieces were auctioned  at the McMichael Gallery’s Canadian and Indigenous Craft Fund Raiser (2021).

Prior to the pandemic, I had done photo shoots of the art and graffiti in the laneways in my area of downtown Toronto as well as the lampposts in Ajijic, Mexico. I had to abandon my original idea of hooking some of rugs in situ in the laneways of Parkdale, and to retreat instead to my tree house studio to work on this project. By translating my photographs into hooked rugs I am using the traditional medium of rug hooking to take a fresh look at how laneways are transformed by those who pass through them. Stay tuned for my next magazine article on this subject to be published in 2022.

Let’s Connect

If you have any questions about my practice, please contact me via email.