ONLY CONNECT

 In 1977 I moved from Winnipeg to Toronto with my husband Andy Patton. I had been accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at York University. After 3 months I dropped out and got a studio at the Lansdowne Collective. Here I met Sheila Ayearst, Kim Adams, Judith Doyle, Carol Wainio and a number of other artists who had studios there.

 The focus of much of my work is on the connections I make between other places, other times and other people. My interest is in how other people, present or past, relate to the world differently from the way I do. I did not want to develop my own recognizable style. Instead I wanted my work to act as a conduit, bringing together various elements to construct new and unexpected meanings.

For my work I have appropriated images from elsewhere, the actual work of other artists and text written by others as a device to make connections. I am intrigued by the similarities and differences of the individual parts that I put together to make a work. I often refer to my working method as montage because of my use of other people’s work and of more than one medium or physical element in a work. My exhibitions can resemble group shows.

I had my first exhibition at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in 1981. There I met Joanne Tod, David Clarkson, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Stan Denniston and Brian Groombridge. I was a board member of YYZ from 1982 to 89. I connected with London artists Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner and was a board memeber of the Embassy Cultural House in London in 1985/86. I was represented by the Wynick/Tuck Gallery from 1985 to 2011. In 1992 the Winnipeg Art Gallery organized Sum Over Histories, a ten year survey exhibition that travelled to five locations across Canada. I had a solo exhibition at Birch Contemporary, Toronto in 2014.

My work is in the collection of a number of museums including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Museum London, the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

I completed a Masters of Visual Studies (with a collaborative degree in Book History and Print Culture) at the University of Toronto in 2007, then went on to complete a Ph.D in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, London in 2012.

I exhibited Credits (extended ) at Museum London in 2012 as part of my PhD program.

I have worked with The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius since 1998 after I found a fragment of one of his meditations in Original Sin, a mystery novel by P.D. James. In 2013 I was a volunteer with ArchaeoSpain during their excavations on Monte Testaccio in Rome. The dig unearthed Roman amphorae from the early 160s A.D., the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

I co-edited with Julian Jason Haladyn the book Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990, published by YYZBOOKS in 2022.