I've spent almost a decade as an Industrial Designer and Craftsman working with artists and clients to realize their projects in based in wood. From an early age, I was encouraged by my parents to solve problems through making and repurposing, as opposed to simply buying something new. In recent years, my art practice began to naturally emerge from the scraps and offcuts from projects, and through my collection of British Columbia wood. During years of working in the shop and visiting facilities across the province, my interest in the by-products of production started to grow. I became fascinated with the abundance of available material regarded as waste, or of low value, and the affordances this material provided. My direct involvement as a community organizer for a local wood innovation community has given me a unique insight into the wood industry in BC, and the status of forestry across the province. Through my research and investigation into regional wood species, material processes, production technologies, and craft techniques, I've developed a visual language that's uniquely my own.
My artwork is expressed through the unique characteristics of wood, and by using basic tools and simple techniques, I bring out the qualities I see within each piece, to create compositions. Each piece of wood has a story, shaped year by year based on its specific growing conditions within an ecosystem. When making, my childlike nature emerges in the work, through the narratives I develop around the collections I'm working on. My work is inspired by the worlds and objects created by science fiction, transforming robots, and the various "Super Teams" from comics and television shows I grew up watching. I draw from my collection of photographs of nature and the built environment that capture colour combinations and compositional elements. Unlike my Industrial Design based work, which is technical, precise, and highly engineered, my artwork is whimsical, colourful, and usually pretty knotty. When working in wood, you are dealing with a natural material with grain, irregularities, and variances. It's the relationships I've formed towards these characteristics that I believe makes my work distinct.
Today, I live and work in Vancouver BC, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh working with trees grown within other traditional territories across the province. By working within the constraints of local species, waste, and less desirable cuts of wood, I'm playing a part in dealing with the impact of colonization on BC’s first-growth forests. The industry has historically prioritized harvesting high-value Old-Growth wood but needs to develop ways of creating more value from 2nd and 3rd growth sources and harvest fewer trees overall. These constraints force me to be creative and develop methods and processes that transform available wood into something that's desired, useful, or aesthetic. Through my collective activities, I want to inspire people to think differently about how we treat regional resources and promote creativity and collaboration as value-added processes. With this thinking and meaningful acts of making, I hope the value I'm creating can spark interest within the emerging generations in communities in the places where I work and create.
