I’ve been making art and escaping into alternate dimensions since before I could form sentences.
I was a real-life version of that horror movie trope of an eerily quiet kid drawing disturbing supernatural pictures with a crayon. My skills have improved with age, but the subject matter hasn’t changed much. As a millennial, I have a perfectly healthy and topical obsession with apocalypse, dystopia and the nauseating confluence of crises on our planetary doorstep. My most recent exhibition and ongoing project Cryptids of Oughtnorot sums up what I believe art is on the hook to do in light of humanity’s catastrophic footing — to crystalize the abstract and unwieldy complexities of our impending demise into visceral images that humans have always been much better at dealing with.
I got my first paid illustration gig in high school working on what would become madnesscanada.com, an online portal of research and teaching materials about the history of madness in Canada. On top of illustrating and designing for the website for several years, I got to meet and learn about radical anti-psychiatry activists and survivors who took on an oppressively carceral mental healthcare system in the sixties onwards. They would inform and embolden my descent into creative madness when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2012. I’m now a relatively stable maniac paying my dues with a day job in the world of graphic design, copywriting and digital marketing for non-profit organizations, but over half of my brain is always tinkering with personal projects, some of which I have been lucky enough to publish and exhibit. My visual art exhibition Cryptids of Oughtnorot was open to the public at the Show Gallery on Queen West in January of 2024.