 |
| Sports Day, with my younger sister Jane |
I was lucky in my childhood: loving adoptive parents, freedom kids don’t have today, creative and athletic activities galore and summers on Gambier and Vancouver islands. Camping; canoeing; hiding-seeking in urban corn fields; meteorite watching from our sleeping bags on the boathouse roof; fleeing bats down narrow night roads channelled by 150 foot trees; making our own radio shows; and calling our mothers the Beasties. It was a time, like for lots of lucky kids, of joy and self-discovery. It became me.
Then came high school and hormones and that self got lost, led astray by the bodily changes of puberty (not to mention the Peer Pressure).
My 20s and 30s were spent rediscovering and recreating the fertile terrain for the creation of an adult version of that kid self. Philosophy studies at UBC; bike trips (Vancouver to Montréal, solo up to northern BC, Europe, Israel, Turkey, Japan).
 |
| South of France 1986 |
 |
In Istanbul, with a McDonald’s garbage
bag full of Turkish carpets 1987 |
|
After 4 months working on Kibbutz Kinneret and a Negev Desert cycle with a rescued dog on the back of my dear friend Nikki’s bike, working as a Chambermaid in an Israeli hotel, where the work sucked but was made up for by the experience of living with a small group of African clandestine workers who’d had the good fortune to migrate 25 years ago before the desert and ocean crossings became today’s futile, often deadly desperation.
 |
In the Negev Desert Israel with
Nikki and Mags the dog 1987 |
Then going to art school (Concordia, Montréal) and becoming an artist (photography, found object and poetry installations).
 |
| Diana’s Quiver (1993) |
|
 |
| Escarpolette and |
|
 |
| Sword and Shield (part of FOLD) 1995 |
|
 |
| Hill Mantra – rue de la montagne (1993) |
|
 |
| To Fall (1994) |
|
 |
| Baptême (a book work, Galérie La Centrale, 1996) |
|
And working in the Montréal art scene, most interestingly at Studio XX where in 1997 I created the international web art festival Maid in Cyberspace (now updated to Festival HTMlles).
An invitation from ISEA to be a monitor in West Africa’s 1st web art project in Dakar led me to Sénégal and all sorts of good and bad things: my husband and my cat being of the former. So too my art exhibition Toubaab! at the Canadian Embassy. Toubaab! explored my integration as a visible minority immigrant into Senegalese life.
 |
| Toubaab! (2005) Entrance Hall, Canadian Embassy Dakar |
 |
| My senegalo-canadian flag |
 |
| 1 in a series of photos in Toubaab! (photos: Djibril Sy) |
 |
| One of the poems and proverb signs in the exhibition |
The exhibition was preceded by freelance web design in Dakar and followed by a wonderfully challenging and rewarding job as a professor of web design and Department Head at a computer college in Dakar.
There was phosphorescence in my childhood and I had found it again.
And then my arm started to twitch. After sustaining 12 hour days of computer work suddenly I could barely type. Three years later I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
As the shock, anger, denial, anger fade, the bodily changes of PD mean starting all over again, again.
A new me.
Which equals the old me minus just about everything I ever loved to do.
