All of my art work is a way for me to find my own personal power. I look at the natural world and am struck by the beauty and the innate sense of strength and connection in everything around me. With every piece I make I strive to inspire that feeling in myself again and to encourage it in others.
The Bloom project started as a way to use up scraps and for me to feel more comfortable with the natural size and shape of my vulva. No two are alike and I found that I got really excited about combing different colours and patterns and seeing how the fabric would fold. At the moment I am up to 57 individual vulva’s and I finding I’m not as motivated to continue.
I had a particular exhibition space in mind for these pieces and unfortunately they weren’t selected, and honestly it’s got me a little bit bummed. Sometimes with art it feels like you have to be constantly hustling to get your work “out there” and all that effort can be draining. So I don’t know where this project is going to go. I know I will continue to make my little fabric vulva’s because I love how they turn out but I don’t know where in the world they will find a home. But I guess sometimes I just have to trust the urge to make and believe that everything else will take care of it’s self. Even if I throw myself a little pity party or two along the way.
This month I have started to experiment a bit. I have spent the better part of a decade fascinated with birds and using them as my main subject matter in my art, but I got the itch to start playing with something different. I was watching the hilarious and poignant Netflix show “Sex Education” when they started talking about vulva’s and shame. And it hit hard for me. I have felt for a long time that my body is some how “wrong” because I don’t look like what is represented in main stream media. And it turns out I am not alone. Women don’t seem to know what normal is or even that there is no normal!
I love bio diversity and that’s one of the main reason’s I’m so drawn to birds. But I thought I should take a moment and turn that highlight on personal diversity too. As I dove down the rabbit hole (or vagina as it were) I discovered many woman have been celebrating the vulva and all it’s glory long before me. Including Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Table” and Hilde Atalanta’s “The Vulva Gallery“. I know what I am doing is not new and it doesn’t have to be. It’s not about creating something ground breaking, we’ve been talking about vulva’s since Georgia O’Keeffe (and probably long before that too!). It’s about becoming more comfortable with my own body and no longer looking to other’s for approval or validation. I wanted to celebrate the wobbly bits, labia majora and minora in all their glory. Showing that they come in all sorts of colours, sizes and shapes. It’s not about fitting into a neat little homogeneous box, it’s about loving yourself and all your amazingly wonderful variations.
If you connect with me and my work and would like your own perfectly imperfect vulva, head over to my shop page now. Each one is completely individual and no two are the same, just like us 🙂
The Western Living Designer of the Year awards ceremony is going live tonight. It’s happening in Vancouver on a lovely roof top patio but I unfortunately can’t attend. Thankfully it will also be streamed on Facebook live September 22 at 6:30pm MST. So join me tonight, pop a glass of bubbly and celebrate all the DOTY winners including little old “one to watch” Maker, me!
I’m over the moon! Western Living Magazine has chosen little old’ me as the “one to watch” in their Maker category for the 2021 Designers of the Year. It’s such an honour to be included in such an amazing group of other creatives and be recognized by the judges at Western Living. Now “one to watch” means I didn’t win but it does mean they see potential in my work and that for me is just as amazing.
Did you know Western Living turns 50 this year! This magazine has been the go to for design in Western Canada for half a decade. They know what’s beautiful / interesting / stylish in the world of design and they chose to include me. It gives me a boost of confidence to keep going!
I found out this week that I was chosen of one of 5 finalist for the 2021 Western Living Designer of the Year Maker category. I am beyond thrilled! I entered the contest on a whim thinking not much of the possibilities but am amazed to be grouped with such a high caliber of makers. Take a look at the other finalist for some of Western Canada’s best interior creatives. www.westernliving.ca
One of my first soft sculptures, the Great Grey Owl
I didn’t always work in textile collage. I trained as a Graphic Designer. I spent three years learning about fonts, kerning, grids and prepping files for print. It was okay, I was good at it. But I really missed the tactile feeling of making something in real life.
In my last year of my bDes I decided to switch my major to illustration and focus on watercolour paintings. Spending all my days working in front of a computer didn’t seem appealing. As an illustrator I would be painting and drawing and creating work for art directors. As my final year was coming to an end and I was about to graduate, I had two classes that sparked my interest in sculpture. In one class I created girly analogue video game characters for a gaming company (they were not well received :P). Another class I worked with a local Catholic School Board to create relief sculptures for the exterior of a new high school.
Those classes gave me the confidence and permission to try something new.
I went back to my 80’s child crafting roots and broke out the wire, fabric, hot glue and styrofoam and started creating these cute graphic sculptures. I progressed into bigger more complex pieces and realized my home was too small to store all these new soft sculptures. Out of the desire to save space I decided that I would take this style 2D, and work flat.
My first large scale textile collage, Group of Ostrich
Collaging with fabric felt very natural to me. I love combining different colours, patterns and textures of fabric in interiors so this new method of working felt like combining my art and interior design worlds together. The large scale and dramatic colour I was now able to play with felt like an extension of the watercolour style I had developed. It took me until this year to figure out how to bring the mediums of watercolour and textiles together but I am happy with the results and can’t wait to see what comes out of this new methodology.
This is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while, “What’s with all the birds Tracey?!” And the simple answer is, I don’t really know…
It’s not something that has been a rational choice. I don’t have a manifesto about the social implication of flight or the environmental consequences of species loss. I can’t sit down and tell you what my intellectual intention behind a piece is, and honestly, for a long time that has made me feel like less of an artist. I used to think you must have something to say and make people stop and think. But my personal approach to art is more feeling and less thinking. I am a visceral artist. I don’t make art to make a point, I make art because it makes me feel good to make something beautiful and I hope it makes people feel happy to see something beautiful.
Right now I choose to celebrate the beauty in birds because I seem to be endlessly fascinated by them. It’s the curve of their necks, the graphic shape of their form, their strange staccato movements, their ability to take flight, their wildness, their diversity, their colour, their songs … They interest me on so many levels and maybe one day I’ll put into better words why I am so drawn to them but for now it simply boils down to I think they are pretty.
While the world has been locked away in our homes, physically distancing and wondering how everything could change in a few months’ time, I have been in my studio. I’m calling the last three months my Covid Art Residency and it’s actually been a joy for me. I realize I shouldn’t take pleasure in the midst of so much sickness and global unrest, but you have to appreciate the beauty of the sunset even when the world is burning right. Ever since I finished my house reno, and dedicated myself back to art, I have been waiting to try something new. I started out as a watercolour painter and I still love the liquid, unpredictable, fluidity of a good watercolour bleed; and wanted to incorporate that into my textile work. I started off March by buying a bunch of paints, dye and fabric with the intention to just experiment. Sometimes experimenting in the studio is like playing and other times it’s like banging your head against the wall trying to create the “vision” in your head. Maybe it was because of the addition of the stressful times but this experimentation was more painful than anticipated. In the end though I discovered organza and how it takes dye really well but doesn’t bleed too much. I worked with a few pieces incorporating watercolour painting on organza and like how things are turning out but there is still more experimenting to be done!
I am having trouble writing this post. I seem to have come to some sort of writer’s block and can’t seem to articulate what we did. Maybe because now I’m writing about my space. The basement had a layer of detachment to it because it always was for someone else. Although upstairs is not my forever home, I went a little more bold and “me” with the choices and therefore I think I’m scared to actually put them out in the world. Not that I’m scared people won’t like them, I’m more scared they will be indifferent to them. They will look at something I slaved over for months, literally putting my blood sweat and tears in and will say, “oh I guess it looks nice” and move on completely. I don’t know if i”m looking for a gold star but I’d like a little fanfare. Is that too much to expect, or is that a sign I need to do more work on myself so my interior mindset is not so wrapped up in what others think of what I’ve done … I should meditate on that one! Well here it goes, push past the block!
Now that we had mostly finished the basement portion of the reno it was time to focus on ourselves. The top floor had all the lovely hallmarks of an outdated 60’s bungalow. Small bedrooms, no connection to the backyard, & a tiny isolated kitchen. The plan for the upstairs reno was to addressed all these and change the flow and make the house feel more open and modern.
The first task was removing a couple of walls both in the public and private spaces of the home. We took two bedrooms and combined them into one larger room, creating a spacious feeling master bedroom with a small walkin closet. I know they tell you to never change a three bedroom house to a two bedroom but with the addition of the extra bedroom downstairs on paper we still have four bedrooms in the entire house (even if it is technically only two bedrooms per suite!). It’s a decision I stand behind. Not only did we get to move the master to the back of the house and get all the lovely morning sun but we got a room that feels livable, rather than two tight little boxes.
In the public portion of the house we basically tore down all the walls … really only two, but it opened up the space completely! With the dining living and kitchen open to each other we created as great of a great room as you can get in a 1150 SQ FT bungalow. The light now streams in at all times of the day and we can feel connected to guests and ourselves while we preparing diner. Of everything we did I think this had the biggest and best impact on the house.
I decided that although the walls were going and open concept was the goal, that we could still incorporate two posts into the layout, rather than pay thousands and thousands of dollars to install a 20 FT beam. I know people seem to have real problems with posts, and yes sometimes they need to go, but in this case we took a problem and made it a feature. We incorporated the post into the edges of the island, giving it a stronger presence and the feeling of custom mill work.
Now that the house was open inside we wanted to have it feel connected to the outside as well. We decided that replacing the old kitchen window with a door was the best way to give us indoor/outdoor living and privacy from our tenants. Not an easy feat, as it required us to relocate the kitchen sink plumbing and build a landing deck outside, but the payoff was huge. Now we don’t feel disconnected from the outdoors and have easy access to our bbq, a key cooking appliance in our household.
Since we were already tearing down a lot of drywall with the wall removals and we had seen what a big impact to drafts and noise the triple pane windows made, we decided to replace all the windows in the house. We could have hired pros (it would have been the faster option :P) but the budget was tight, I knew everything is figureoutable, and we already had installed three windows (albeit with the help of friends who wouldn’t be there to help us again 🙁 ). In the grand scheme of things, installing windows was a pretty easy job. Once you became comfortable with the fact you cut a giant hole in your house it was just a matter of basic framing and waterproofing.
Now that we had the floor plan opened up it was time to tackle the kitchen! The biggest and most important part of our reno which I’ll talk about in the next two posts. But for now a sneak peek of the mood board.
My plan for the bathroom was similar to the kitchen, make cheap tile look good and play with black and whites. I knew for sure I wanted to tile the walls of the tub/shower but the budget for tiles themselves was very small. In the upstairs bath we had played a lot with geometrics, so I wanted to keep that theme consistent throughout the house. This time I decided to simplify it by using rectangular tiles and playing with lines. I found an inexpensive white wall tile and paired it with a slightly more expensive white textured tile and created alternating horizontal stripes. The subtleties of it are hard to capture on film but in person it reads as a contrast of shiny and texture (see a pattern here?!, same thing I did in the kitchen). But again white on white, just looks sooo white, so it needed a little bump in contrast.
I found a matt black tile at a discount tile shop that I thought would add the perfect pop of contrast to all the shiny white texture. I originally wanted to lay it in a herringbone pattern but after measuring it out we discovered first off it was hard to get everything square! And secondly the bath was small and the tile was large, not allowing you to see much of the pattern anyway. We decided on a basketweave design instead which I really preferred once we got it installed. It’s understated and modern in its simplicity while adding a bit of visual interest to the floor.
We opted for a grey vanity with a white stone top from Ikea and decided to add a little bit of bling behind the faucet. I found a light white and grey mosaic tile in a chevron pattern that wouldn’t pull so much focus. Turns out when it was installed it read a lot darker than I wanted and not the subtle pop of pattern I was looking for. Not every choice is going to be a home run but we decided to leave it in place and just roll with it.
I decided to keep the vanity lighting very simple and clean-lined and let the vanity mirror, a trendy hexagon in black, be the focal point. The good thing is both of which are easy to change out at a later date is styles change or we just want to mix it up.
Storage is a big component in bathrooms and really houses in general. We made the bathroom about 18” larger than your standard builders’ bath and therefore were able to build a nook of shelves at the end of the tub. I would like to eventually put doors on them but for now they are open very deep shelves perfect for pretty storage baskets.
To bump up the storage in the rest of the suite I knew we needed to maximize our three closets. They were one of the last projects we tackled and by then the basement reno budget had been spent. Instead of racking up debt to buy weirdly expensive closet rods and shelf systems from a big box store, I decided to get creative. Using a combo of Ikea metal curtain rod hangers, leftover plywood, used Billy bookshelves, two premade brackets and electrical conduit I created really inexpensive but functional closet interiors. I’ll do another post showing how I outfitted three closets for less than $150.
That about sums up our basement reno and adding an income suite to our home. The rest of our reno focuses on the “great” room on the upper floor which is where I get to add a little more of my personality to the design.
