These pieces were painted in Banff, between 2002 and 2005.  I wasn’t making art yet, but working as an administrator for an arts residency.

Then…I came down with a sudden and brutal form of chronic fatigue. My hands and feet went numb and it was difficult to walk, some days even the muscles of my eyelids had trouble fluttering. For weeks at a time I lost the ability to speak, read, or think in text. Even cartoons, or questions like, what would you like for dinner? were too complex for me to parse out. 

As is usual with long-term, non-lethal chronic conditions, I lost my job, then most of my friends. Other people have exciting reasons for losing track of their 20’s. But for years in the mountains, I barely shuffled in a sea of impressions without names. Without understanding any kind of language I lost any sense of existing as a human individual. 

It’s always a perplexing thing to describe, and I’ve been a bit secretive about this part of my life. Over the years, especially since the onset of long COVID, I’ve started to allow myself to recall and recount what I flippantly call my life as a vegetable.

The worst of it lasted just over two years… which incidentally was the time it took to go through the medical evaluations to go on long-term disability. 

As I recovered, I started painting…and plotting to upend my life if I ever managed to climb a set of stairs in less than half an hour.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of these, because they are linked in my mind with this time.  They were secret, and personal, varying in scale between 24″ square to 5′ panels, oils or acrylic on canvas.

But the fact remains: that loss made me viscerally aware of the precarity of that curious illusion that being human means being a conscious, productive, autonomous entity. There is something subterranean beyond that, and it is there that my aesthetics are rooted.

Painting on the floor of the living room.  We lived in a huge apartment on the Buffalo block owned by the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, where my husband Myles worked in the photo archives.  Looking up and seeing a long blue stripe of fresh paint along the dark hallway, about a foot above the floor…realizing there was a strange long-haired white cat watching me steadily. Must’ve crawled through the window. I stare back, and for a moment neither of us notice that he had, in fact, dipped his long fluffy tail into a yogurt container full of prussian blue. He got up, stretched, and began to rub himself against the walls creating an interesting layered effect. Flicking, blurring the wall as he rubbed prussian blue deeper into his fur, flicking fresh streaks of blue as he went.

I caught him up and dropped him in my tub, trying to rinse but he flattened and fled in a mad wet streak of blue onto the roofs of Banff Avenue. I never saw him again, but wondered what the owners made of their drenched, blue-tinted cat when he finally went home. 

Still… in a town where small pets were referred to as cougar-bait, sodden blue-but-alive couldn’t have been so bad. 

Same living room few weeks later: Bad day. Lying on the couch I notice Myles has left one of his Pinhole cameras in front of me -really just a film canister with sensitized paper. I turn to look at it carefully. Later he develops the image and shows it to me – an 8 hour exposure, and I’m barely blurry, meaning that what I took to be a moment, turning to look at an object on the shelf, had actually taken me 8 hours.