Art is anything I can get away with...

or

For This I Went To College?

I went to school for this stuff. That doesn't prove anything, except that I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is.

University of Waterloo Honours B.A. (fine arts - studio) 1990 specializing in drawing and mixed-media sculpture.

A pleasant enough experience. I'd already finished a degree at UW so the setting held no surprises. The difference between studying math/computer science at UW and studying art there is that my art professors remember my name. Still. That is an observation about a difference in myself as well as the programs (and class sizes).

And there is no experience in an art class (studio or history) that can compare to sitting in a lecture hall with several hundred math frosh as the time approaches the hour... and dozens of digital watches begin to beep, starting about five minutes before the hour and continuing until about five minutes after.

University of Saskatchewan M.F.A. (studio - sculpture) 1993 specializing in mixed-media sculpture.

Hell froze over. And I studied there for two years.

Don't take a Master's degree in Fine Art unless you really need to. It's a bit like playing jazz, or dancing en pointe. If you're doing it right, it really hurts. I had a miserable time, thanks for asking, but I needed to stop making the work someone told me to make, and do the work I needed to do myself.

I arrived and quickly found out that nobody knew a thing about my work, or really cared. I had a button made that I wear in the studio to this day: "I know what I'm doing; get out of my way." Then I set out to invest two years in taking apart How I Do What I Do, looking it over, and then seeing if I could put it back together again.

Know what I found out? Ideas are cheap. I come up with zillions of ideas every day. The tricky part is how I decide which ideas I'll work on. I figured out that what I usually did was reject ideas rather select them; my method was entirely destructive rather than constructive. So I made a list of all the reasons I used to reject ideas, and then I set out to break 'em all and see which ones still seemed valid.

This process was the basis and source for most of my work in my graduating exhibition. You can get an idea what that work was about from these slides:

• Snowdome with Oranges, 1993
• Tea Ceremony, 1993 & Stuff Shed, 1993
• I'm Winning The War With My Fertility, 1992
• My Mother Should Have Thrown A Party When He Died, 1992
• Plank Path and Berry Bricks, 1993
• Patricia at 26, 1992
• Time Pieces, 1993
• Which Way Is North From Here? 1992
• At The Origin Everything is Naught, 1992

I met some good people. I made at least two really good friends. I don't blame Saskatchewan for the experience but the winters were really cold (and I'd lived in Labrador for four years).

I was a wreck when I finished. But I learned how to be a bad girl, and to grant myself permission rather than ask for it, and that sexism is "real" (in the sense of having experienced it first-hand) and that I love teaching drawing.

I learned that this stuff matters to me. That I have lots of things to tell you all, and every day I try to find a new language to do it in.

I learned that you have to listen to your obsessions rather than conquer them. They're trying to tell you something.

I learned that the only good reason to be an artist (or a writer) is if you can't stop it.

Royal College of Art Post Degree Experience Program (P.E.P.) 1993-1994 specializing in bronze casting and print making.

I spent my thirty-fourth birthday touring a foundry in Stroud (up in the Cotswolds; rolling hills, drystone fences, sheep) that specializes in amazing patination, then visiting a stone circle in Avebury and dashing back to London for a performance of flamenco that was so primally erotic I still squirm remembering it.

When my friend, Steve Hull, was trying to convince me to accept the chance to go to the RCA (and bankrupt myself to do it), he said, "You'll always remember you did it. You'll never remember how much it cost."

He was right.

There is life after school. I started my own business, the big black pig studio, where I get an amazing rush every single class I teach. Best job in the world, built from scratch.

Working for a living slows down my artistic production but it keeps me juiced, growing, and constantly engaged. I've been working on a few different things. There are several collage panels I call the unauthorized portrait series. I keep coming back to a bunch of quirky wee assemblages that seem to be the descendants of the stacks I did in my masters exhibition.

Finally, I'm immersed in a series of vertiginous chalk pastel drawings called pretty things, floating objects in a field of rich colour. They're getting bigger. Don't know what that means yet. Won't find out until I make some more of them.

I'm working on a drawing book. If you visit Amazon.com (no, I will not give you the URL inline for that) you'd be tempted to say nobody needs another drawing book. I don't agree, but I'm going to have to write one heck of a book to prove my point. Meanwhile, I'm also developing a book on building geometric solids with kids. There it is, the cross-over between math and art that everyone's been waiting for me to do. Don't hold your breath waiting to see it in print. This is all hypothetical until some publisher actually hands me a cheque.

So there was this farmer, see, and one day he finally hit it big in the lottery. Big money. Millions. Kind of money you dream about. The press arrives at his farm to get the daily feel-good story. First reporter sticks her microphone in the farmer's face and asks, "So, what are you going to do with all that money?"

"Jeez," he replied, "I thought I'd just keep farming 'til the money runs out."