Printmaking with Grade 2s using Canadian animals as the subject matter.
My collection of experimental mini print/collages was growing obsessively, so I began a new quilt series called "Collecting Stories". Each quilt would look at nicknacks we accumulate over our lifetime and the hobbies (like stamp collecting), that mark our time. I'm putting the borders on the Garden Fence pattern in this photo.
Hot off the press (though cold to the touch because the ink is still wet), I have these 2 newest pieces from the Petite Stories series framed and at Seymour Art Gallery's, 3...2...1 Art Party fundraiser for $100 each. Opening night is Tuesday October 16 at 7 pm, 4360 Gallant Ave, North Vancouver BC, (in the heart of Deep Cove). Show runs to October 21st 2012.
I'll be in Toronto for the run of the show, so I can't attend, but I hope Seymour Art Gallery can realize its mandate to: "establish and maintain an active and financially sustainable Art Gallery that will foster excellence and promote interest in the arts." I hope their plans include paying artist exhibition and reprography fees in the future......
Domestic Landscape 2, Lithography, 3.5" x 3.5", 2012
Rocking 1, Lithography and Collage, 3.5 x 3.5, 2012
Images from a Community Quilt Project with kids, youth and adults from the Ismaili Muslim Council of BC and Tri-City Transitions I facilitate for the The F Word: Exploring Feminism in the 21st Century exhibition at Leigh Square Community Arts Village, Port Coquitlam. The community quilts explore voice, equality and healthy relationships.
The collaborative series In Wait is inspired by Penelope, wife of Odysseus, who finds herself besieged by suitors during her husband's long absence. In order to avoid making a decision regarding matrimony, she announces she must weave a shroud before she can wed again. Penelope weaves during the day and her maids unravel her work during the night, thus never completing the shroud and allowing her to find a resolution in waiting.
My work often references icons, so the rocking chair was an obvious choice for In Wait. As a child, I thought of these chairs as old people furniture, preferring the rocking horse for my spirited physical motions to nowhere. Once I had my daughter, the rocking chair was an intimate, soothing envelope where we cuddled, nursed, worried and comforted into asleep. As I drew, painted and sewed the rocking chairs for this series, I felt that it is the external motion of rocking that best portrays who I am while I wait for answers and news. I often feel that I am tethered to the post, waiting for the starter's pistol to go off and give me decisions that will send me into full speed action or quiet repose. However, internally my thoughts never run a straight line back and forth, but loop, circle and knot among themselves. While I was in stables watching horses recently, I recognized a similar anxious energy as the horses kicked, circled and whinnied in their stall, waiting to be led out to perform. Whoa girl, I realized, I should not have put the horse imagery aside!
I'm opening up my studio to the public during The Drift www.thedrift.ca and culturedays www.culturedays.ca this weekend while I work on this little experimental series. I'm actually hoping I get a lot of work done, but a whole lot of visiting would be grand too. Hope you can drop by!
PS. PS. They'll be nothing to buy, but there should be cookies!
Finished the final 24" squared quilt forTravel Stories on Sunday. The pattern was inspired from memories of my grandmother's dollhouse that I played with whenever we visited her. The quilt will accompany the Children's Apron and I'm quite satisfied with it. It feels knotty to play with wallpaper scraps knowing that the worse thing a critic can say about your art is that it looks like wallpaper. Now I can reply, "well yes, of course it does". 
Can you see the quilted lines that create furniture outlines?