My “fire work” emerged from a trip to an artist residency in Ireland in 2016 during a breakup and a period of burnout. I stayed in a stone cabin, collecting kindling each morning to light a fire in the wood stove. I saw pieces of wood, newspaper, and ash as triangular compositions for paintings. This encounter with the wood stove became an allegory for a climate in crisis and my life and grief cycles as I struggled with health, matters of the heart, and the articulation of this work that would then become the source of my painting for the next 8 years.

Soot covered paintings from self directed residency in Berlin in reference to those first fire sketches I did in Ireland, these were exhibited in a solo show called “Fire Works For Pleasure”, 2018

My mother left Northern Ireland in the 1970s, a period of violence due to British occupation, known as “The Troubles”. I grew up visiting Belfast, witnessing a bombed-out, barb-wired, and occupied space. Green in the Irish flag means Catholic and the Orange Protestant, the white middle is peace. Image in the middle is of me, my sister and neighbourhood kids, with my Grandfather and Aunt in background with a black dog in front, Belfast Northern Ireland, circa 1985

The work is titled “Birch Bark is like Snakeskin”, because while I was painting the snake like figure moving from top left corner to bottom right, I noticed similarities between that of birch bark and snakeskin in the way there are layers of regeneration in the skin. In this painting, all the unscorched lush materials in the world gather on top of this last stump to drink water from its center. Although, there needs to be gentleness in the gathering because the desire to drink from the limited supplies of this oasis, could cause friction between objects and it too will endure fire, like the stumps in the background.  The snake and the birch represent a symbol of regeneration, fertility, and balance and is a hopeful symbol for healing of ourselves and the planet.

The bases of this work is from the firework started in Ireland, then developed into a series of paintings for my MFA at York University. 

Snake Skin is Like Birch Bark
Acrylic on Birch Panel
36” x  48”, 2021

Stone like Fruit, Fruit like Fire, MFA Solo Exhibition, Gales Gallery, York University, 2022, photo by Lisa East, source materials, like the footnotes for the paintings, displayed on shelves.

Stone like Fruit, Fruit like Fire, MFA Solo Exhibition, Gales Gallery, York University, 2022, photo by Lisa East.

The Strawberry Moon Rose Over the Lake Just like The One in This Painting Acrylic on Birch Panel, 36 x 48”, 2022

Phthalo blue is an especially dangerous blue. It has been my primary blue for 17 years. It is like fire, so be careful, it’s a flammable blue. Like grief, the blue in this painting is so deep it's almost black. My therapist said the feeling of grief is experiencing the purest form of love. This is how I feel about phthalo blue, so potent you can only handle a tiny bit. Like the birch bark painting, the one of a scorched planet, this one is what painting looks like when you have rapidly melting glaciers. There is not a lot of visible heat in this painting, but all this water is from a warming. You catch the anchored raft, in the moment before the candle burns through the rope and the raft drifts out of frame.

Call Me, It’s a Climate Emergency, Acrylic on Birch Panel, 36” x  48”, 2020

After my undergrad, I started working at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts in 2007 on Mnisiing/Toronto Island. The building was an old school, converted into an artist residency and event space. In the late 90s it was abandoned by the school board due to the building’s proximity to an eroding shoreline and encroaching lake. Officials declared it no longer suitable for children, as they feared a rogue wave would eventually wash the building away. The building seemed viable enough to be occupied by artists, and after some debate, it opened as an art centre in 1999. In 2017, the prophecy of the rogue wave came true; the building was submerged by water due to massive flooding. I spent over a decade making work about Toronto Island. During my long walks there, I found the shoreline offered endless materials suitable as subjects for painting.

Witches gather wip 2021, influenced by picture of me and my sisters, 1988

Fire is the Spirit of Matter. Acrylic on Birch Panel, 36” x  48”,2021

When The Earth Started  to Show its Flowers, Acrylic on Birch Panel, 36” x  48”, 2022

Nick Calder, in his book Restless Earth, personifies the planet as a device to explain that the geological matter of deep time is a more-than-human story. If the earth is said to be 4.6 billion years old, he says, and we took each mega-century as one year, we could imagine the earth as a 46-year-old person. It took until they were 45 years old for the earth to show its flowers (fire showed up at the same time), and it was only 4 hours ago that humans showed up.

The ash archive,  it’s a piece that includes the ashes of all my fires, of grief, ceremonial and celebrations, accumulatively, 2021 – present

Another body of work emerged from a grief cycle when I received a cancer diagnosis while completing my MFA. It prompted me to work outside of the institution, that be academic and medical,  and go into the field and paint. I spent time in the woods that year at residencies, questioning what landscape painting looks like with the loss of 85% of the world’s forests and uncontrollable wildfires affecting Indigenous populations that have stewarded this land the longest. By seemingly escaping one institution by painting outdoors, I was confronted with a whole other institution, Canadian Landscape painting. In the face of a climate crisis due to natural resource extraction, I want to move beyond the idyllic notion of Canadian landscape painting and disrupt these concepts by deepening my understanding of what it means to make work about land on stolen land

A large plein air painting completed during a residency in Halliburtonon Halls Island, including details of the painting, 2022

Practice is described through an ability to transform through repetition. Every morning, I do a little matchbook painting, and now have well over 300 of these matchbooks, a great source reference for larger paintings.

Artist Residency I created/facilitated, at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Mnisiing Toronto Island, called “i made it through the wilderness”, exploring climate grief, plein air painting during smoke filled skies in June of 2023. Image on left taken by Alexandra Iorgu, right image of M. Gnanasihamany

Plein Air with Doris McCarthy’s Apple Trees, at Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program, 2023

I started to  make connections between growing food and plein air painting, using my canvas stretcher as a trellis for plants like squash, while also creating biodegradable paintings from bioplastics from Doris McCarthy’s apple tree while at the residency program at “Fools Paradise” . As I turned my practice from fire to plants, it became imperative for my paintings to align with sustainable ecological cycles and my body's cycle.

Photo by Lisa East, 2023

Like using fire as a means of building a painting compositionally, I began mirroring the structural supports and networks needed to grow plants and make paintings in co-authorship. For example, butternut squash seeds require 105 days to bear fruit; correspondingly, my painting also takes 105 days to complete, utilizing the canvas stretcher as a trellis for the squash to grow while I paint.  Image of squash by Lisa East

Bio-degradable painting, as plants grow, they leave marks on circular bio plastics. The support is made from apple bioplastic, made with gelatin, glycerin, water, blue spirulina, and is wrapped around a metal circular trellis. The sap from butternut squash was used as an adhesive to adhere the bioplastic around the metal frame, along with gelatin based tape. The apple trees are located on a cliff at the Scarborough Bluffs, at a shoreline dating back to the end of the ice age, used as trade routes by Wendat (Huron), Seneca and later the Mississauga First Nations. Two seeds from same apples, growing out of bioplastic, 2024, showcased at 3 days of design in Copenhagen.

In my practice, I am looking for ways painting can work cyclically and in co-authorship with an environment. I want to work alongside a growing garden with a "plein air" practice that participates in not only making paintings about plants and the landscape, but painting "with plants" and "by plants“

‘a joy, a sanctuary, a root’ bio plastic project from Doris McCarthy Apple Trees, plants as they grow they leave marks, biodegradable paintings, 2024

Bio paintings exhibited at the "3 Days of Design" Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark from June 10-15, 2024. For six months, I had been participating in an online international program hosted by “The Material Way,” where I have been learning about methodologies and the technical aspects of material creation, specifically in the creation of bio-based plastics.

I was invited to a three-person show, "Red, Yellow, Blue," at Xpace Cultural Centre, curated by the Gas Collective 2024. I created a new painting referencing the subject of fire (Red) for the show to accompany one of my large-scale landscape paintings, and I saw potential for a new series. This project will now take my fire work, reimagined, in conversation with personal and collective narratives found in my land-based paintings. Photographed by Polina Teif

Fireworks in Garden, Acrylic on Linen, Guitar case frame in garden with Cocozelle squash, 12” x 40”, 2024

New body of work emerges: My work explores myth, materialism, and earth-based spiritual practices, resulting in subversive paintings and spaces. Inspired by the myth of Romulus and Remus and the concept of “mothering-elsewhere" or “mothered by other," I investigate diversified care systems as a supportive response to our current climate epoch. I ask how the Earth gets nursed when it can no longer be our wet nurse and how non-biological, non-gendered mothering might offer solutions for healing ourselves, the planet, and each other.

Studio shot of “Feeling Form Studio 8”

I renovated my garage in the back yard after a major surgery as a present for myself. Photo on right by Lisa East.  I will be working on She-Wolf Painting in the studio, which is a painting of me breast feeding my dogs, includes irregular panel board that I will paint fire works on, as shown on the right in charcoal, along side landbased narrative paintings.

Preliminary watercolours for the new painting series, 2024/25

New work, “The Heart is a Good Composition, 36” x 48”, acrylic on panel, painting started at Doris McCarthy artist in residence program and is based on the cliffs of the Scarborough bluffs, finished in home study, 2025