I'm a painter, printmaker and mixed/multimedia artist, based in Victoria, BC since July 2026. After retiring early from an academic career in 2019 to pursue my art full time, I have gone back into higher education, enrolled in the MFA program at the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Trained as a cognitive scientist, I asked how the human mind constructs reality – how we impose structure and meaning on the world from partial, incomplete, and often unstable information. These same questions animate my visual practice. I bring a research-oriented mindset to the studio, using drawing, painting, and printmaking not merely as vehicles for representation, but as generative systems—tools for exploring the emergence of complexity from simple primitives, how coherence is constructed and how it is broken, and the thresholds where identity transforms.
I am drawn to boundary conditions, the place or moment of fundamental shift. I frequently work in series, using repetition as a means of investigating an abstract form, recognizable shape, or a structured system—first to become deeply familiar with it, then to test it. I may start with a simple seed form, overlaying it upon itself with small variations until complexity emerges from the aggregate. Or I may layer successive states not spatially but temporally, tracing incremental change to locate the moment identity is lost.
Through a largely process-driven approach, my work enacts processes of perception, memory, identity, and the generation of structure and meaning from primitives. The resulting images—whether spatial maps of recall, domestic armchairs undergoing erosion, mirrored biomorphic twins, or warped forest substrates—stage the very instabilities they investigate.
Bachelor of Arts, McGill University
PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Emerita of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University