So now what?!

As many of you may know, in June I finally walked across the stage at Queen's University to mark the end of my PhD journey. Although a little anti-climatic in that I had defended in November 2023 and as a doctoral student you don't walk across the stage with your entire cohort, it felt like an important moment none the less as I now had to start thinking about what I was going to do next!

Also co-hosting a lovely event of walking, planting, and eating out at the Hickling Farm as a way to say thank you to members of the Barrie community who have been integral to the journey, I can honestly say that as much as I was feeling a sense of relief about being done, there was a huge amount of anxiety building up in me at the thought of needing to come up with and stick to goals / projects outside of any existing institution or funding.

As such, since April, I have been busy applying for grants, exhibitions, residencies, conferences, and any other opportunity that spoke to me in an attempt to escape the post-Phd blues. With many of those applications ending in rejections, luckily, it was an amazing walking artist residency on Toronto Island with Simon Pope and Sarah Cullen that provided me with some direction and inspiration that helped me to arrive at a current project entitled Wht-trSH.

Recently accepted into an exhibition entitled The Ecology of Freedom; an ecological broadside campaign presented by ecoartspace in collaboration with The Crow's Nest, in Baltimore, Maryland, author and climate action advocate Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Patricia Watts selected twenty-four artists to be part of the show including Mark Armbruster, Lynn Benson, Christina Bertea, Mazerick Betko, Pamela Casper, Nicole Dextras, Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), Holly Fay, Carol Flueckiger, Helen Glazer, Lawrence Gipe, Karen Hackenberg, Katie Kehoe, Deborah Kennedy, Pierre Leichner, Taina Litwak, Minal Mistry, Constance Old, Hugh Pocock, Jatun Risba, Jann Rosen-Queralt, Ruth Wallen, and Bart Woodstrup.

Excited to be included in the exhibition, I was immediately re-energized to introduce the project to Simcoe County during the 2024 Culture Days in which I have invited others to help clean up Johnson's Beach, Centennial Beach, Couchiching Beach, Innisfil Park Beach and Minet's Point before the first snow.

Inspired by own childhood spent playing on the beaches of Lake Ontario and reclaiming and refocusing the derogatory saying of white-trash to reference waste as a colonizing force, not unlike the five white gifts/lies of flour, sugar, dairy, lard, and salt given to Indigenous communities during the formation of reserves and reservations in North America, this performative and interactive project acknowledges how the shininess of mass-produced objects and their packaging disguise multiple ills contained within their material bodies that wreak havoc on human and more-than-human conditions.

The project also attempts to redress how walking as an artform has become problematized due to having a foothold in early practices of Euro-colonial exploration, appropriation, development, and industrialization of lands not one's own. To read more about social issues around walking, you should definitely visit the Walking Lab website directed by Dr. Stephanie Springgay and Dr. Sarah E. Truman, two scholars also extremely influential in the areas of research creation.

Still trying to figure out how to grow this project so as to incorporate my drawing practice, I am beginning to think on how I might also a create a store that sells some of the bizarre and valuable things I find on the beach during the clean-up walks.

Commercially, I have also continued to show my Landscapes on Tables series that involved painting over old work, and UN/make old works on paper to create a series of collage works entitled Notations. Initially abstract and minimalist in their output, this has led to a couple of interesting commissions in which I have been asked to create very personal collages to commemorate a volunteer award and a wedding ceremony! Sometimes you never know where your work will take you. A big thank you to Frances Thomas, Lagom Gallery, Wildewood Gallery Royal Victoria Hospital and Pamela Ross for making all of this possible.