What's in a name?

Home isn't a specific place for me. It's a feeling of being able to be yourself, either because of the people around you or because a place gives you that instinctively. I've found it in a studio at 2am, on a promenade along the Danube at 6am with a bitter cup of instant coffee, in a secret garden in Budapest, and at an art market where people know me as the fruit lady.
I'm a First Nations woman of Saskatchewan heritage, born in Saskatoon in 1979, living and working in Fort McMurray for the last twenty years. I work shift work, which means the art happens in the margins, late nights, early mornings, focused bursts between rotations. I also serve as president of Team Canada Sr. Men's Football.
I came to painting early. My mother Margaret was an oil landscape painter and the only reliable way to keep me quiet as a child was to keep my hands busy making something. I left it behind after losing my father at eleven and didn't come back seriously until my late twenties when I picked up a brush again looking for stress relief and found something closer to a calling.
I am self taught in the sense that no institution handed me a degree. What I have is something harder to quantify, years of artist monographs and reference books, workshops taken across North America and Europe, an extended study program at the Accademia del Giglio in Florence, and the particular education that only comes from standing in front of an original work and seeing what a photograph can never show you. I learned from those who came before me by going to find them.
Travel is structural to my practice, not recreational. When I'm home I'm pouring out, for commissions, for shows, for the people who need something from the work. When I'm travelling I'm filling back up. The paintings that come from those trips carry that energy. A jellyfish in calm water. Lavender and poppies growing in a Belgian ditch. A lone chair in a Seville alley. A patisserie window in Paris, sketched from across the street while someone brought me food and wine and kept the world at a comfortable distance so I could work.
I make figurative and symbolic work across acrylic, watercolour, ink and digital. My pieces tend to have an argument underneath the image, something they're pushing back against or reaching toward. Butterfly Tears pushes back against grief being permanent. The Scarcity series, shown at Le Fokus in Paris in 2023, pushed back against the silence around food inequality. The Face of Assimilation, currently in production for a 2027 Alberta premiere, pushes back against the idea that cultural erasure is history rather than present tense.
Most of my paintings have a poem attached to them. I write the way I paint, to make something abstract concrete enough to look at directly.
My work is held in private collections across Canada, Hungary, France and Belgium. I have been commissioned by the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Arts Council Wood Buffalo, Circe Magazine and others. I was the subject of Rendering Visions, a documentary currently on the international festival circuit. I was shortlisted for the Visual Arts Award at the 2025 Wood Buffalo Excellence in Arts Awards. A residency at Venezia Contemporanea in Venice, Italy is pending for February 2027.*
*Pending confirmation.
I am a member of CARFAC, the Arts Council Wood Buffalo, and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak First Nation.
If something here made you stop, that's what it's supposed to do