Exhibition: In Her Garden at the Peel Art Gallery

Exhibition: In Her Garden at the Peel Art Gallery

One Sentence Summary: My installation Floating Garden is  paired with Jannick Deslauriers’ Phasmes to explore humanity’s journey from botanical abundance to environmental devastation. Date: September 2023 This fall, I had the privilege of exhibiting at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) in Brampton, Ontario as part of In Her Garden, a dual exhibition that explores humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. Running from September 30, 2023 through February 20, 2024, the show pairs my work with that of Montreal-based artist Jannick Deslauriers, creating a powerful narrative contrast between flourishing beauty and environmental devastation. The Exhibition In Her Garden presented two radically different visions, each filtered through a feminine lens that imagined hybrid realms between reality and fantasy. My contribution, Floating Garden, filled the gallery with a romantic, vibrant garden suspended from above. Using only thread, I created stitched drawings of flowers that sprouted mid-air—each bloom soft and slight, swaying gently as visitors moved through the space. The flowers responded to the disturbance of bodies passing by, gracefully shifting in unison with their neighboring blooms, creating the illusion of a living garden complete with an imagined fresh scent permeating the space. In stark contrast, Jannick Deslauriers created Phasmes (Phasmids), a world drained of colour and life. Her mixed media installation evoked an abandoned amusement park, a nuclear disaster zone reminiscent of Chernobyl, or a war-torn landscape. Visitors entered this “contained space” through a plastic curtain, confronting the sad conclusion of environmental tragedy—whether caused by human neglect, error, or explosive aggression. Where my work celebrated botanical abundance, hers mourned its absence. Together, our installations created a narrative arc...
Public Art: Floral Canopy at Albee Square NYC

Public Art: Floral Canopy at Albee Square NYC

Short Summary: My new installation Floral Canopy transforms native New York plants into hundreds of suspended wire sculptures that create a floating wildflower meadow. In August 2023, just as students and staff prepared to enter their new building for the first time, Floral Canopy was installed in the lobby ceiling of the Albee Square Campus in Brooklyn. This site-specific public artwork represents the culmination of a four-year journey that began in 2019—a project that deepened my understanding of how art can honor place, celebrate local ecology, and create a sense of belonging for the communities that encounter it daily. Floral Canopy is composed of hundreds of hand-shaped, powder-coated steel sculptures painted in vibrant greens, yellows, and oranges that form a floating field of native plants above viewers’ heads. Like three-dimensional drawings, these intricately crafted and gestural wire forms accumulate into a suspended wildflower meadow—shifting perspective and inviting students, teachers, and visitors to look up and discover a garden where they might least expect it. The foundation of this work lies in botanical research and careful observation. I spent considerable time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Native Flora Garden and the New York Botanical Garden’s Steere Herbarium, examining plant specimens that call New York home. I made dozens of drawing studies of local species including May Apple, Button Bush, Milkweed, and many others—plants that have adapted to this specific climate and soil, plants that have their own stories within this ecosystem. This process of documentation became integral to the artwork itself. By translating scientific observation into artistic interpretation, Floral Canopy demonstrates how different ways of knowing—the scientist’s careful cataloging and the artist’s imaginative rendering—can work in harmony....