It has been a long time since my last blog post.  I find it difficult to balance all the moving parts of my creative practice.  I'm sure I'm not alone with this challenge but sometimes I feel the isolation of being an artist in the world and combining this with other things I need to do to survive and thrive.  I also work for a charity with people living with long-term, chronic mental illness.  This work reminds me of the importance of presence, listening and simply being.  In a world focused on productivity and what I experience as a manic obsession with activity, being slow, being still, listening to what is, can be a big challenge.  It is also challenge to continue to value these parts of myself, valuing my slow, my still, my presence to others. 
I have been working on cutouts for the last few months.  The process of creating the cutouts is a meditative practice, an artistic research process and an exercise in emergence.  I love working with hand made paper from Papeterie St. Armand in Montréal.    I am interested in abstraction and simplification.  To create an experience of silence, layering, light - qualities of life.  

Click here to see the latest addition of the Craigardan Journal, the GARDAN 
https://issuu.com/craigardan/docs/the_gardan_journal_issue_06_  
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 Finishing up my stay at Craigardan residency as a John Brown Lives! Fellow with an Apple Barn presentation of my work and thoughts on future work. There is much work to do and the arts form a language to new possibilities and emerging solutions.  Many thanks to Craigardan and John Brown Lives! for this great opportunity.  I’ll certainly miss my fellow travellers. (Thanks for the photos Daesha Dévon Harris)

I'm curious about the layers of any given context.  The ground we walk on, the ecosystems I am part of, the solar systems, human relatedness, the person, the body, the consciousness, the known, intangible aspects of all of it.    The web I am in the web I am part of.  Some of which I can see, touch, smell,sense and intuit.  Parts I assume to know and then the parts that I am unaware of, blind too.    These are not existential questions or curiosities for me.  Inquiring into my nature and the web that I find myself in brings forth more living, more aliveness, more knowledge.  Knowledge that I believe can allow for both problems and solutions to emerge.   I look to the relationship - the relating - the space in between this or that which is not really a space at all but the place where life comes forth.   There is no we without the I and no I without the we.    
I seek to make visible my reality my inquiry in the process and tangible manifestation of art.  Hoping that this too participates in making tangible the less tangible. 

First day at the artist residency exploring the layered meanings of nature, ecology, relatedness.  Re-relating to the natural world and how this provides us with knowledge towards a more sustainable, connected, related web of life.   Books on my shelf are Re-Relating in Art Practice , a collaborative art process with several artists from Rotterdam Borgerstraat and the other book is Enlivenment, Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene by philosopher Andreas Weber.

I am  so pleased to be part of such a wonderful group of artists, writers, culinary artists, musicians and choreographers at Craidardan Artist Residency  in the Adirondacks.   
I am the first artist in a cohort of four artists ( Erica Blunt - Twelve45.com, Tiffany-Rae Fischer - Emerge125.org and visual artists Daesha Devon Harris)  chosen for the John Brown Lives! Fellowship.  What an honour and a privilege.  More information about  John Brown Lives! https://johnbrownlives.org/

​The John Brown Lives! Fellowship at Craigardan supports humanists engaged in the performing and visual arts, creative writing, scholarship and activism, and whose work is guided by a compassionate sense of history and its contemporary reverberations. JBL! Fellows possess a commitment to expressions of freedom, equality and social justice, ideals for which the Abolitionist John Brown dedicated and sacrificed his life.
Devon Reid is the first JBL! Fellow to join us on campus this summer. Devon is a multimedia artist, curator and cultural mediator whose work focuses on the notion that all of life stems from an interconnected wholeness. “We are all but fragments from this whole and each fragment carries the knowledge of what it is to be fully interconnected; each work of art, each process is thus an archaeological exploration of the intangible world and how it manifests in material form.”

It took three years but the Cultural Policy is finally here! As Municipal Councillor and President of the Culture and Community Commission it was my responsibility to insure and support the development of the Cultural Policy and lay the groundwork for funding from the provincial government.   I feel confident that this policy will insure the development of cultural activities in Candiac that are rooted in sustainable development goals and integrated with Candiac's ecological heritage.