Distilling

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.