My day has really just started! I made my usual breakfast of a smoothie with a concoction of healthy powders, today I chose chanca piedra and cacao powder to sprinkle in, along with a cup of peppermint green tea and warm lemon water. I feel this will be a nice foundation for the day. Hope your day is off to a great start too!

The first half of 2022 has been a bit jarring, and the familiarity of it all makes it so strange! Reacclimatising to public transit and a regimented schedule for part of my week was stressful. However, it is amazing how quickly you can get back into the groove of things, even with new perspectives in place. I very much miss my days of having all the time in the world to explore and to follow the path each day had in store for me. So far, I am feeling a tad burnt out, but I am always trying to find a harmonious way to balance the different obligations in my life.

Thank you! Being in lockdown allowed for the luxury of time to create. Dave and I created the work for A Spell Too Far as a way to give ourselves a sense of happiness and sanity during an otherwise rather bleak time. It also fulfilled a sense of synergy we had been yearning for, as we had been wanting to work together for some time and lockdown presented itself as the perfect time to do so.
The whole thing was very organic, never in our wildest dreams could we fathom it would turn into a book. We would wake up every morning, and fresh from our dreams, talk about our ideas of what we wanted to make that day. About a year after Dave and I had made the initial group of images together, our friends at Same Paper reached out about wanting to create a book of the images. We didn’t want the book to be solely images made in lockdown, so we created more images, using the initial images as a jumping off point for the book. Unlike the initial images, these later ones had no limits, as we had the ability to shoot in a studio setting, and use things found outside the bubble of our abode.

A Spell Too Far is the world beyond a magic spell gone wrong. Something in the spell has been recited with one or two words off. Things are a little peculiar, like that of an odd dream. There are familiar characters, but not quite. Simple, ordinary materials that become something else entirely, are presented in a new world with its own story, past, present, and future. Each fruit creature or flower made of pipe cleaners or what have you, we knew would have its own sense of self once we captured it in a photo.
As artists, you only have so much control until your art takes on a life of its own, and that is what the title is about for us.

It was a joy for me to live with my partner as well as to create with him. I absolutely relish spending time at home, and to do so without any sense of obligation to the outside world, was very liberating. We are both people that go all-in with whatever we do, so we both really dove wholeheartedly into this one-on-one, intimate time. Figuring out how to spend our days felt like an adventure, and making work together operated like a self-imposed art residency.
Additionally, we are both adept at taking time to recharge on our own, which enabled us to enjoy our time when we reconvened. We had ideas and projects we had put on a backburner, and the lockdown was the time to act on those ideas. Since the fate of the world seemed so uncertain, we could only really live in the present moment. There seemed to be no rules and past references didn’t seem to matter.
That is an interesting interpretation of the miniature chairs and table scene! There are two images of miniature furniture in the book. One is a tiny lilac chair and vanity table I found in New Mexico, surrounded by flowers I dried from my wedding bouquet. The scale of the flowers towers over the vanity mirror like a tree. The other is a table scene made out of fruit. It consists of four different chairs, made of different fruit or vegetables. Both images were actually made post lockdown. I’ve always had an affinity for small things. Almost any material can become medium to make something tiny, which is both overwhelming and amazing at the same time. It also allows you to make things that may have been near impossible to make life-size and opens up a world of possibilities.

I would imagine creative blocks are definitely easier to overcome with another person by your side, as they bring an energy to the environment that is unique to them. In my case, I was lucky that person was Dave. He is a quick worker and jumps into things intuitively. I take my time and am quite inclined to focus on little details. It was a synergistic mix of energies to bring to the table, as we were able to push each other out of our comfort zones. Many of the photos started as a loose skeleton and were then thoroughly realized in the actual shooting process. Each photo is a conversation between both of our sensibilities and art-making processes, both physically and verbally.

My parents operated Japanese sushi restaurants my whole childhood. I would spend much of my time in the restaurant, leafing through these shiny, large-paged books or calendars of beautifully plated sushi with elaborate garnishes and unusual color and texture pairings. That really informed my young and current mind in so many ways, especially in terms of the presentation of food and the different forms it can take. My sister and I would always help my mom make food as children too, things like making dumplings from scratch. We would fold the dumpling wrappers into funny shapes and laugh at how they emerged looking once cooked. Creating with food has been a natural progression from so many elements of my childhood. This type of thinking also lends itself to using other materials that are not traditional mediums as well.

I very much enjoy working with precarious, ephemeral, temporal materials. I’ve always had a knack for choosing uncooperative and unusual materials, and nostalgia plays a part as well. My dad loves rice krispies, and in an effort to make him a healthier version as a health-conscious teen, I would experiment with using different types of puffed grains, like kamut, and organic cocoa rice crispy cereals, with vegan marshmallows. After making so many rice krispies, I found you can mold them into shapes when they’re warm. It requires patience as well as an exploration, understanding and appreciation of your chosen mediums. I sometimes find it harder to work with permanent materials, as the thought of amassing a bunch of solid pieces makes me feel a bit uneasy.  I’ve always been drawn to temporal mediums and art pieces, things that exist in a certain time frame, a special moment. Making actual permanent, three-dimensional objects is something I do want to explore however.

Yes! I would very much like to explore three-dimensional artwork, something with a physical presence and permanence. I don’t usually keep a lot of my old work, as I find myself feeling a disconnect with the pieces as time goes on. Perhaps that is why I shy away from three-dimensional work, but it is something I have actually been thinking about these days, and I hope to be able to share something soon.

Utilising ourselves as characters in a play or another world was something that was readily available to us during lockdown. However, it is also something that we had fun doing, as dressing up provided a lot of respite from being stuck inside all day with no occasion to dress up. Utilising yourself or someone very close to you, such as a partner, in your work allows for a level of intimacy and experimentation that is not always possible otherwise. It also feels very natural and easy somehow, since you know yourself so well, you know what you would like and not like to imaginatively play dress up as, instead of projecting things onto someone else.
The artists’ relationship to themselves is something that is always growing and evolving – being able to have it documented is so fascinating. Whether it’s playing a part or amplifying an element of yourself in an exaggerated manner, it allows the viewer to have many glimpses of your psyche. Having a curiosity to utilise yourself in your work also creates an opportunity for an exploration of your identity that is beneficial for both your private and public self.

My only plan really is to make more time to make work! I have not been able to make work truly for myself lately as I work very slowly, and my part-time job and commissions have taken up a lot of my time these days. So much goes into conjuring a book and I feel it will take a little bit more time before the time is right for another. However, I would be very excited for another!