Updates

Ants in the Park

A few months ago, my family and I headed to lovely Montebello Park for an afternoon picnic in support of Our Community Food Store, a wonderful initiative started by my multi-talented neighbour, Karrie Porter. The goal of Our Community Food Store is to open a downtown food coop in St Catharines. After spending seven years passing under the ghastly QEW when we need to buy food, I almost swoon when I think that soon we might be able to walk a few downtown blocks to a well-stocked grocery store run by friendly people.

When we reached the park, I was surprised and delighted to discover three ant masks I’d made for Theatre Beyond Words‘ production of “Tales from the Garden” in action.

In addition to her work on Our Community Food Store and several other project, it turns out that Karrie  was the coordinator for neXt Company Theatre’s Travelling Roadshow, a government-funded initiative for which neXt staged a series of “spontaneous moments of culture” across the Niagara Region and Toronto. “Ants in the Park” was part of the series.

Elmo and Unpacking

Many moons ago, I assisted my uber-talented and imaginative friend Vicky Mifsud-Teti on the makeup for Holly McNarland’s music video for her song, “Elmo.” In the short time that I worked as a makeup artist, it was the most rewarding job that I had. Holly was to be made up as a marionette, and it was a challenge.  Vicky came up with the genius idea to make the marionnette hands out of dental acrylic. It was a lengthy process and often frustrating, but the hands worked. 

I worked with Vicky on other jobs, and one of the many valuable things that I learned from her is that when it comes to making things, the key is being resourceful — use products for purposes that they might not be intended for — the important thing is to get the project done.

I recently moved into a new home, and while I was unpacking, I found one of the marionette fingers from the video. It’s not surprising that I hung onto it (I am a packrat, which can be a good thing if you have a big enough house), but I was happy to find it.

All Clear Sky

So the collages for I Can Say Interpellation (BookThug) are done. The book will be out in May. These poems of Stephen Cain’s are brilliant, disturbing, funny, and I’m incredibly flattered that he asked me to illustrate his book.

I’ve played around with collage before, but I’ve never put together a series of collages before this. It was challenging. I’m fortunate to have a father who has a huge library and an amazing collection of paper ephemera — and who was willing to spend hours of his time helping me find images. And I’m fortunate to have a mother who was willing to visit for a week and read to she-who-does-not-sleep for hours on end so that I could get the project done. But it’s done! Check out the cover on Stephen’s blog: http://stephencain.blogspot.com/2011/03/now-in-colour.html

One Little Girl

Of the things I’ve made this year, I’m most happy with my gift for my daughter’s first birthday. What I thought would be a weekend project, turned into months of cutting and sewing (keeping in mind that caring for the daughter leaves me with little time for much else). She likes the book now (especially number 5), but she’ll probably appreciate it more when she’s 20.

When I made this, my daughter was not yet one, and I had no idea how much stress a toddler can put on an object. The big pink butterfly is one of the things in this book that needs to be repaired.