HBC Collection Artist Statement

This collection emerged from a period of deep introspection, a season of questioning, unravelling, and ultimately reclaiming my own sense of clarity and strength. As I worked with these fabric-based forms, the coloured stripes, folds, textures, and shifting light and shadow stirred feelings of family, nostalgia, and comfort, but also the friction, strain, and complexity that surface within the intimate relationships that shape us. The sculptural quality of the blankets became a language for these emotional dynamics, with the HBC textiles holding softness and contradiction, comfort and pain, at the same time.

As the work developed, the rhythm of the blankets began to mirror the rhythm of the landscapes I grew up with: rolling fields, soft foothills, distant mountains, and the emotional highs and lows that mark a life in motion. These references to prairie and foothill landscapes surfaced not as literal depictions, but as echoes of internal terrain. In this series, the formal elements of painting—light, colour, shape, and shadow—become a way to articulate those emotional landscapes. Each piece traces how our inner lives are formed and transformed by the world around us.

Woven quietly through the work is the legacy of Hudson’s Bay textiles: the beauty and weight of tradition, the physical warmth of the blankets themselves, and the complicated history held within them. This history is not the central subject, yet its duality of comfort and harm, pride and truth, mirrors the same duality present in the emotional terrain that inspired the series.

Ultimately, these paintings explore weightlessness & gravity, softness & tension, how struggle and comfort coexist, and how the forces around us—relationships, landscapes, histories—fold together in ways that shape us. This body of work is about finding light again, noticing the way things open, settle, or gather, and trusting the quiet certainty that things fall together in their own time, perfectly and inevitably, just as they are meant to.

This release marks the first part of a larger body of work. Part Two will continue to unfold these themes through new forms, colours, and larger sizes.