I grew up in Victoria and studied art and art history at UVic with some exceptional instructors, including Walter Dexter. My early work consisted mostly of painting, ceramics and installations, but I discovered the power of Photoshop and other digital tools in the latter half of my time at university and became fascinated with the new avenues they offered.

Digital cameras were much too crude at the time to achieve what I wanted so most of my first forays into digital art made extensive use of flatbed scanners; often painstakingly piecing together large images from many different elements. At that time I would send the work to Vancouver for printing on traditional photographic papers by exposing them with LED light arrays.

My focus then was on the way that technology was affecting our lives and the impact it had on our sense of identity. I was also quite interested in using digital tools to erase the boundary between what is real and what is fabricated.

I graduated with a degree in Art Education but found myself gravitating towards the world of commerce. I worked for a number of years as a graphic designer before starting my own design business (Oculus Design + Marketing) in 2007. During this time, my studio became an office and making art got lost in the push to establish and sustain my business. Happily, this exhibit marks a return to a part of my life that is very important to me.

While I still use flatbed scanners to capture some of the elements I work with, I now use digital cameras for the majority of my work. All images are retouched on the computer in my Esquimalt studio and often assembled using software before finally being printed using pigmented ‘giclée’ printers.

My interests still lean towards exploring the fine line between the real and the fabricated. I have also become quite interested, now that it is almost impossible to tell a straight-up photograph from one assembled on a computer, in how to deliberately leave traces of the artist’s hand – brushstrokes, if you will.

I am currently working on two new series of images, one of which makes use of one of my favourite art forms: Japanese Ukiyo-e prints.