I work in sculpture, electronics, sound, geography, creative non-fiction, and serious games. My practice fits into three categories:
Objects | Installations | Situations
I build interactive art, sound art, and land art. I organize walks and convene events. I worked as a historic masonry apprentice in Toronto for a few years and can give you a tour of buildings that I’ve helped to restore around the city. I’m researching the ways that people build AR apps to animate historic sites, libraries, archives, and museums in creative ways. I hand-carve topographical maps in stone. I record underground sound with geophones. Over time, I put these different things together, and then it’s a project.
Right now, I’m figuring out how to build a 3D gallery street map in Unity for climate crisis collaboration in a project I call Microlocal. It’s Pinterest for future public urban space. I’m leading a workshop at Vector Festival on Saturday, July 13th as part of this project. More information here.
Everything is simple at first. Because it starts with a scratchy mechanical pencil drawing on a scrap of paper, then reality.
In 2015, I represented a clean tech company at the New York Times Energy For Tomorrow Conference associated with COP21 in Paris, after working in corporate social responsibility for almost a decade. It changed my perspective on everything.
Now I’m building work to bring the functional, expressive, and aesthetic realities of climate crisis adaptation closer to my current locations and lived experience. It’s the issue of our time.
I build art for practical purposes. I have a background in theatre, construction, craft, as well as philosophical aesthetics, business ethics, game-based learning, program evaluation, and strategic planning. In my work career, I have managed arts festivals, hosted university-based research conferences (informally called “awesome knowledge parties”), and designed qualitative research projects on learning and behaviour. I am a knowledge mobilization specialist moving research into action, a learning designer, and facilitator.
I believe that tangible objects are our most direct route to ephemeral experience. I always start with an object. Then I construct a microworld surrounding it with its own logic and possibilities.
For example: I make traditional hooked mats, some including 60 thousand loops. Most are landscapes of familiar places in Newfoundland. I incorporate silvery conductive thread into the designs, and hook these up to electronics to turn these landscapes into touch-responsive soundscapes. These textiles fit under Objects. Get enough of them together and they’re an Installation. Animate the installation with a facilitated experience on climate adaptation and we’ve created a Situation.
I take people on creative detours toward the serious stuff that we often want to avoid. For example: In 2018 I co-founded a game-based learning lab at a Toronto business school’s leadership centre. We built interactive narratives (choose-your-own-adventure scenarios) playable on mobile phone based on well-documented, everyday ethics challenges. The aim was to prepare early career employees for handling these challenges in the workplace, in ways that typical business case learning does not. This fits under Situations.
I enjoy planning. I enjoy solving problems on the fly. I enjoy working alone. I enjoy working with people who are not easily embarrassed about the intensity of being creative and how weird and rewarding that can be.
I enjoy people who let themselves get curious and stay curious. Most of my projects involve 2-20 people as collaborators, technicians, crew, and advisors. If you want to connect –> DM me on IG.
You can read about my work as an independent professional here.