How did poetry and visual art enter your life, and what has kept you moving between them?

• I started to take poetry seriously as a craft, as something with an engine or power of some kind, when I received a literary journal in the mail and on reading it found one of my poems there. Sure, I had submitted it (by mail, and a long time ago). I never expected it to take. I mean it was just something I did while sitting in front of the fire waiting until I got tired enough to sleep. I remember the night I wrote that poem. It was called “read by starlings”. It was a prose poem of a kind. That was an accident. I hadn’t even heard the term yet. I just sat there listening to the starlings rustle in the walls and then went back to reading the books on the card table in front of me. The poem was a result. I remember thinking, seeing it in print well. I better learn about how poetry works.  Art came the same way. Doodling. I still call what I do doodling. I play with paint and edges and love the way rubbing alcohol pushes at the edges of a drop of acrylic paint. When I painted “Ant tracks” I was reading about how ants forage, how they move efficiently across the land. I was also reading The Unknown University, poems by Roberto Bolaño. The collaged text in the painting is from that book. I loved that book. The marks along the right side of the painting are from my reading about ants. How I felt about what I was learning and reading moved into the painting. Then I sleep, have interesting dreams, get up and do it again. It’s how I live. That pathway between sleep, living and art, those are my ant tracks. The paths I make in my human kind of foraging. What am I looking for? Food of a kind, I suppose. Nourishment, certainly.

What makes you stop and look more closely at something? Can you recall a moment when that attention became the beginning of a piece?

• Maps will make me stop and attend. During my reading about ant foraging patterns, I saw several maps made of their pathways. Couldn’t think about anything else for hours. That line “someone sleeps in the ruins” from Bolaño did the same. I still think about that line, his poetry. There are scenes from books that cling to my psyche long past when I can remember anything about plots or characters. There was a moment last year during the fall winds—I was sitting bundled up on the back porch and a bluejay came looping by just at the same time a really strong gust of wind came thumping down the side of my house. I wrote a poem called warm in a windstorm as a result.

Could you walk us through the making of “ant tracks”? What first caught your attention, and how did the work develop?

• I was lucky enough to win a live-work studio space in the city where ant tracks was created. Very expensive city, but in that wonderful studio I could leave out canvases in process and paints and brushes and all kinds of interesting edges and pencils and other mark makers. And I had a bed. And a computer. And a shelf of I-must-not-be-parted-from-books. Such incredible luxury—space to play. The blank canvas that became ant tracks sat on the easel. I had my browser open to a couple of essays I was reading on insect movement patterns. Bolaño’s book of poetry was cracked next to my bed. And the jugs of purple and ochre acrylic paints winked at me. That was enough. I sat down on the chair between the easel and the paint table, grabbed a black crayon and started making marks on the canvas. Then I splashed those two colours, then I started moving the paint around with a palette knife. I just played. I played for a couple of days. Then, when reading Bolaño I came across that line about the ruins. I wrote it into the canvas through collage. I think the whole process took about a week. Then one day, the painting just felt done. Like it was satisfied with what it had become. So I stopped. Moved on to something else.

The title “ant tracks” directs our attention toward something easily overlooked. How does scale influence what you notice and what you choose to make?

• Scale is part of it, but really I think what makes me notice things is what we’ve been trained (by our cultures) to not-see. I’m an Anthropologist by trade (or was), but I am definitely an anthropologist by inclination. Learning to see other people, other cultures, other ways of living is like learning to see. Let me give you an example. I have family who live on a Reservation in Washington State. They play stickgame. If you’ve  never heard of it, that is not surprising. It is functionally invisible to the majority culture. And yet it is played by thousands and thousands of people, across territory from central Saskatchewan down to Texas, from the California coast to the Mississippi. The are purses worth many thousands. Very large temporary encampments of Indigenous folks that come with their teams and families (often the same thing).  They come from hundreds of miles away. They stay and play for 2 or 3 days at a time. Sometimes all night. All the time drumming and singing in teams because that’s how the game is played. And it is invisible. Sometimes I wonder what else is just “not there” for the dominant society. Probably one of my worst nightmares, to just not see the world right in front of me. Anthropology taught me skills to see. So did poetry and painting. All my work is a record of the common but invisible things I see because I trained myself to see. 

What is the story behind “dreamcatcher,” including its title?

• Dreams have long been an important part of my life. Early on I learned how to interpret dreams and read tarot. “Dreamcather” started as a very early exploration into digital art, but it was also the base-image of a class I used to teach at a community college on the relationship between dreams and tarot. The images themselves are invested in the Pacific coast region of Canada, where I lived then. So there are salmon and seagulls, the rocks are from a local beach at the western edge of the City of Vancouver, etc. I use GIMP now, but I think that particular piece was created using part of the Adobe suite. 

“ant tracks” and “dreamcatcher” will frame HUMBLE as its front and back covers. When you consider them together, what conversation do you hear between them?

• I think I can say that everything I create is an exploration of how the body lives in the world with this weird-assed thing called “consciousness” and its buddy language. The body thinks but is unconscious. That is super fascinating to me. Because I am human I have two thinking machines. My body. And my languaging-brain. A dog thinks. It has a body. It thinks, understands, makes decisions. A chimpanzee thinks, etc. A human thinks the same way, and interestingly enough, the majority of our “decisions” are made in our bodies just like they are in dogs and chimps. But I have a syntactic mind as well. I have a very-advanced tool-makers mind. Just like you do. But the Orangutan who loves to use hammers and saws, a beginners tool-maker mind. Humans get obsessed by the gargantuan noise-maker of our took-makers mind. We forget we have a body-mind. And yet the body-mind makes most of our behavioural decisions. It seems to me that the body-mind is worth honouring. I think that honouring is what connects images like “ant tracks” and “dreamcatcher”.

What can you explore through an image that you find difficult to approach through a poem—and vice versa?

• There are things I won’t explore. Deep grief. Betrayal. I don’t want to feel those things. They get out of control so very fast. When they do creep into my work, either in paint or words, I often find the work feels like acid on the skin, and causes divisiveness. Probably I could risk such a thing better in paint. But I am not sure I want to live that way. I like the peace and happiness I have built.

How do you decide what to leave open or unresolved in a work? What tells you when you’ve done enough?

• I have two ending points. The first is I just stop connecting to the work. It’s not done, and it never gets done. The second is that the piece starts to breathe on its own. I feel that as a kind of personhood. It’s as if I am not facing a canvas or a page but a person. A non-human person to be sure, and a young person perhaps, but someone who can now self-direct. In that case, what I want goes in the bin. I just follow instructions from there on out.

When a piece isn’t working, how do you decide whether to revise it, set it aside, or follow the unexpected direction it’s taking?

• I decide based on if I still care or not. If I don’t, then I just set it aside. It’s not a feeling of anger or refusal, but rather just a breaking of the tether that binds us. That umbilicus that allows all artists to create new non-human beings.

HUMBLE asks us to “learn to always be learning.” What has your creative practice taught you to reconsider, and what are you still learning?

• I will always be an emerging artist. I know stuff, but oh my word the stuff I don’t know…What I don’t know is glorious. It is the far reaches of the universe. It is what life is lived for, at least for me. Learning is the engine. I celebrate how little I know by learning as much as I can. The world of the unknown is vast. It’s also deeply entertaining.

What is it like to invite writers to respond to your artwork? What interests you about the possibility that someone might see something you hadn’t intended?

• I love collaboration. When I was a young woman I played an instrument in small professional orchestra. It was a very short-lived affair, but what I learned was that together the work of artists makes magic, and that the magic comes as a new vision of the universe. I love it when a musician and a poet get together at a coffee shop. It creates all kinds of baby fireworks. I love it when a painter creates based on a piece of writing he or she loves. Glitter appears from the ceiling. New insights settle like dust on my shoulders. I love it when it happens the other way around. I paint. You speak. We make art. We make life, and that life always has many faces. Now here’s the kicker. I don’t think life was intended. Neither at the level of the universe, not at the level of collaboration. But it happens. Accidental magic. The very best kind.