Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

I love creating work that brings to life imagery living within my heart. I carry my studio everywhere I go, from the sketchbook and markers always found in my purse, to more finished paintings that find a way to a place of wholeness in my home studio. Experimenting with ceramics is another medium that helps me express things that must be physically shaped. Whether it be representational art or expressionism, what is born as my art is a reflection of my current place in my life’s development.

Where do you find inspiration?

I paint what I am intimately familiar with, my family and life’s most ordinary moments as a mother, along with the beauty of the natural world that surrounds me. I am also inspired by dreams, memory, and the realms within. Brining to life my experiences and personal imagery allows a space for the public to meet my work from their own understanding and glimpse at where I exist in the vastness of the human experience.

What would you do with $25,000?

I have guided people through reconnecting to ancestry through art and traditional foods. I have worked with wounded women and men to sculpt altars to their inner child, taught sketching in the wild, and portrait painting to teens. A prize of this size would allow me to offer these types of workshops to underprivileged youth, women leaving domestic violence, underserved Indigenous relatives, and elderly in nursing homes. A prize like this could open so many doors for giving back.