Drawings

Mining For Sky & Trading Gold For Sky

In 2008, after the global market crash, it seemed like the sky of the Chicken Little stories had really fallen. I did a series of sketches based on the notion that some contrarian urge would lead us to use coal-powered steam-punk technology to solve our financial and ecological problems. For these sketches, I used images of excavators, mining equipment and "steam"-shovels as my starting point. The finished series of drawings Mining for Sky and Trading Gold for Sky came out of these musings.

Black and Gold: The Colour of Money

These drawings are almost non-representative, but I have kept traces of oil pipelines crisscrossing plains of black. I think of the colour black as representing oil. In Canada we are hyper-conscious of oil as a global commodity, which sometimes seems to be the only commodity of value.

Flight & Space

Tumbling wings from Icarus’ doomed flight and crumpled biplanes of the Wright brothers are motifs important in my work. Flight links the earth to the universe, creating a metaphor for our desire to escape our uneasy relationship with this earth. This work focused on the compulsion Western man feels towards Space and what that means for Earth. Heaven and the universe engage our imaginations to a degree that the Earth does not. They push our ideas of time and space, and introduce the idea of infinity, leaving man seemingly constrained on Earth.

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