Bobby pins

This one really needs to be seen in person (30x30 inch print). It doesn't translate so well in small jpg.

Heels

After making the Nylons image a peer of mine turned me on to the work of the Brasilian artist Ernesto Neto. His installations are amazing!

Nylons

At the end of the summer my intervention work started to take a new turn and that all began with this image. I became interested in materials associated with femininity, beauty and how women use so many products for the purpose of beauty enhancement. And so I started working with these kinds of materials in order to reexamine and understand them. My constructions remained formal in composition and this decorative element made sense to me since I was dealing with the largest industry of decoration. I'll share more images from the "Feminine Interventions" series this week.

For today: Derick Melander's use of belts.

So back to the Domestic Interventions. The top two were my first attempts at using clothespins and J cloths in the series. I wasn't really satisfied with either image and that brought me to a new stage of combining disparate elements. In the bottom image I used J cloths and clothespins as well as pie plates. The beautiful floating circles that seem reminiscent of mythical suns transcend the materials and will hopefully bring me to other stranger combinations.

More outtakes from the Walrus Magazine shoot.

In the fall I got a call from Walrus Magazine. They commissioned me to photograph a diner breakfast and I was more than happy to do so. I visited a few diners in Montreal and you can see three outtakes above. I chose my red kitchen counter for the last shoot, where I recreated the exact breakfast in the short story that my image was to accompany. It was a great assignment and a lot of fun, especially because with Walrus I always feel comfortable doing things in my style and that always gives the best results. You can read the story and see the printed image in this month's magazine (Jan/Feb issue).

Knitting for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul

Another auction but this time for the greater good. Rafael Soldi came up with a plan, took the initiative, and made it happen. He has rounded up some great photographers all of whom have donated prints in order to raise money for Yele Haiti, a relief organization committed to helping Haitians in this difficult time. The prints can be bought at the auction site here. Prints are 8x10 inches in size, in an edition of 10, and are only $50 each. I chose to contribute the above image of my grandmother doing her bit of charity work. So now you can do your bit and get a great print out of it too.

Bread ties

This was one that I had a hard time with. I collected bread ties for a few months (with the help of many people) and photographed them over and over again. The things on their own are just so amazing that I couldn't seem to do them justice. This image was the last one I did and definitely the most successful. Backlit and through the mesh of a tennis court fence seemed to bring them to another level, beyond the simple plastic beauty of the individual objects.

Today's inspirational artist is Katie Baum whose series Chasing Memory is really wonderful, especially the donut shot.

Also if you are in Montreal be sure to check out Raymonde April's shows. In fact she is having three shows this month, Equivalences 1 at Galerie Donald Browne, and Equivalence 2 at Les Territoires, both of which just opened last night and are located across the hall from each other on the 5th floor of the Belgo Building, and then Equivalences 3+4 which will open at Occurrence on the 30th of January. It's beautiful work full of surprising images, and unexpected sequencing.

Plates

Today is the beginning of another Daniel Cooney Fine Art Emerging Artists' Auction, and the above image is in it. So be sure to visit the iGavel auction site and bid often! The bidding is open until Feb 4th. Here is the link to bid for my image.

And the inspirational artist for today is Tara Donovan; whose use of everyday materials is astounding and exquisite. I would really love to see her work in person.

Pie plates and Food Colouring

I like how this one reminds me of a painter's palette, the basic tool of a classic artist. I find that a lot of the images in this series reference painting. I often thought of the outdoor spaces that I chose as a canvas on which draw with my collections of domestic materials. I took most images from above and when you see the prints on a wall the images look quite flat and canvas-like. The earth as plane on which to create.

For today the young artist Allison Grant. I heard about her work while making this series and at first was somewhat disappointed by the fact that she chose a similar subject (domestic materials in the landscape), but then I realized that our approaches and resulting images were very different and so I didn't loose heart!

Doilies among the Queen Anne's Lace

Check out this amazing installation by Peter Root.

Straws 2

Today the classic: John Pfahl.

My Button collection filling the cracks

And for today: Robin Rhode, an artist who uses drawing and figures and lots of visual puns.

All of our Tupperware

More from the Domestic Interventions series made in the summer of 2009. In the coming days and week I will share with you some artists (other than those I have mentioned before: Orozco, Laviada, Lamson, Goldsworthy, and Infante-Arana & Gorunova) whose work inspired me to try my hand at interventions. Today the amazing work of Andrea Galvani.

Straws 1

So finally I will share with you some new stuff that I've been doing in the last 8 months. At the beginning of the summer I again started working with materials to make interventions in the landscape. This time I just had fun and used domestic materials that we all know and tried to make them funny, interesting and new again. In this one of straws I love the distortion of scale, the vibrant green of the parsley weed, and the way that the straws look like they are having a meeting!