Thank you for joining me here for this quiet little conversation, taking a moment to be with these thoughts, words and images.

I am so not an adrenaline junkie…I know because my father was one, and we had many unusual and ‘exciting’ adventures as a result (a 1970s BelAir sedan sledding down a hill, not quite making the slight bend in the road and landing down an embankment being one of them - I somehow don't think the 'Air' part of the car's model name really meant it could fly).

And yet I realized recently that I’ve been chasing the excitement of new things, new experiences. I find myself doing this when I’m not feeling brave enough to begin new work, or feeling uncertain about next steps…it’s a convenient avoidance tactic that fools me into feeling good because "look I’m learning something new" when really it's more "don't look because that means I'm not putting my work out there so I don't have to think about failing"!

I’ve decided to look deeper when signing up for an online learning or clicking the checkout button to purchase resources, to understand the why underneath the choice. Learning and new resources are all good and fine, but lets be honest: there are enough cool things to learn about and interesting resources to get involved with in the world that we could never ever make or do the thing that is ours to create, ever again. And that would be a great loss to those who are waiting to receive what each of us is here to bring alive.

The final painting in the juxtapositions body of work is really really close to being finished. I've been working on the stitches created with luscious hand dyed threads from Romania, listening to the rhythm of their movement across the painting's surface. By the end of the month I hope to deconstruct my studio space to become my photography space - it means moving furniture around, setting up special lighting and reflectors as well as my super adjustable tripod and digital camera. In between each set of photos per painting, I upload the images to my laptop to check if the detail is clear so I can redo any images while everything is set up. It's pretty much an all day adventure by the time I set up, photograph, and then switch everything back to being the studio space again.

After a very lengthy shipping time, one of the possible replacements for my cloth arrived. It's made by the same manufacturer as my existing cloth and has definite similarities to it. The outdoor temperatures are too cool now to do any testing but it is good to at least have some cloth on hand ready to go.

And as always, I want to express my gratitude to be living and working on the ancestral & unceded territories of the hən̓̓qəmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples.I honour the incredible depths of grace, courage and perseverance of Indigenous Peoples, and look to them as an example as they find their voices amidst the noise and obfuscation of colonization.

until next time,

Mardell