My collages connect Victorian bodies with trees, words, flowers, maps, commerce, and myth. Out of the past re-emerges an imagination of women as literate, violent, strong, seductive, active, and beautiful.
I prefer to work with old paper. It has a texture that speaks of a different time. Some of the paper I work with is from the Victorian age: 1876 (Withrow), 1889 (The Dominion Illustrated), the Royal Academy Pictures and Sculpture annuals (c. 1890–c. 1910), and more recently, the landscapes of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. These fragments imply connections between bodies, maps, territories and the changing landscape. Fragments of advertising, commerce, empire, and literature combine and invite imagination to roam freely.
A survey of how women were imagined in the Victorian age, assembled from the paper that did the imagining.