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 things together. Then it’s a project.
Everything is simple at first because it starts with a whiteboard sketch or mechanical pencil drawing on a scrap of paper, then reality.
Right now I’m building a 3D gallery street map in Unity for climate crisis adaptation in a project I call Microlocal. It’s Pinterest for future public space.
In 2015, I represented an agricultural 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 our current locations and lived experience. It’s the issue of our time.
I believe that tangible objects are our most direct route to ephemeral experience. I start with an object, then 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 in Newfoundland. I incorporate silvery conductive thread into the designs so that I can hook these textiles up to electronics and turn these landscapes into touch-responsive soundscapes. These textiles fit under Objects. In an exhibit they’re an Installation. Animate the installation with a facilitated group experience on climate crisis adaptation and we’ve created a Situation.
I build art for practical purposes. I have a background in theatre, construction, and 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 take people on creative detours toward serious stuff that we prefer 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. Games are Objects that create a Situation.
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.
I split my time between Toronto, Ontario and Sandy Cove, Newfoundland. You can check my work as an independent professional here.