December in the Studio

Alain and Victoria have been good to me. They have been my sounding board, my therapists, my friends - my partners in crime since arriving in Victoria. Their studio has been my church in recent weeks. I feel both safe and free to pursue my ideas no matter how crap they are. In return for some studio space I have been helping Alain and Victoria streamline and organize their administrative duties associated with Ground Zero.

In between our whisky drinking sessions, I've managed to get quite a lot of work done. At a card making workshop, Victoria showed some of the members how to use styrofoam packaging containers as printing plates. By cutting out the tops and bottoms out of styrofoam take away containers and biting into them with a dull pencil or other tool, you can achieve some very good results. I decided to use this technique to produce three editions of prints based on three of my favourite buildings from my recent trip to Scandinavia.

Styrofoam Plate. Villa Mairea. 2009

Styrofoam Plate. Saynatsalo Town Hall. 2009

Styrofoam Plate. Oslo House. 2009

My little corner of Alain and Victoria's studio. December 2009

The latest project is a collaborative one. Amanda, Kirk and I have gotten together quite mysteriously, some may say it was fate. Amanda is the General Manager of the Victoria Event Centre. Kirk is the Technical Director at MediaNet. We've been collaborating on an interesting project to hopefully bring Pecha Kucha Night to Victoria. We are nervously waiting confirmation from PKN headquarters in Tokyo to allow us to host PKN in our great little city. I think PKN would provide a great platform to allow innovative and creative professionals to drink and think together for an evening. Who knows, it might give birth to a new artistic awakening.

Ground Zero Printmakers Society

The Bean Around the World Cafe is one of those places that I go to when I am in extreme need of good coffee. It's also a place I go to when I feel insecure and am in need of some comforting. Maybe it's the aroma of organic fair trade coffee combined with a bohemian atmosphere and soft mood lighting. The place feels young and old at the same time - young because there are always students nursing coffee with their books and/or laptops; old - because it's one of the original buildings built in the oldest Chinatown in Canada.


I decided to join an artist run printmakers studio called Ground Zero Printmakers Society. It is run by Alain and Victoria from their own artist studio in Chinatown. The Bean asked if Ground Zero would be able to provide some work to substitute for a lastminute cancellation. Ground Zero said yes and I was fortunate enough to have been able to submit a monoprint that I did a few weeks ago inspired by my cat.

Dugnad - Departure Point

When I was in Bergen, Norway in September 2009 I met Annette, a fellow Couchsurfer and her friend Camilla. Whilst we were having a conversation over dinner in Annette's tiny little flat she mentioned a word in Norwegian. I asked her what it meant - she said that as far as she knew there wasn't a word in english that meant the same thing as "dugnad"

Wikipedia defines it as thus:

Dugnad is a Norwegian word for voluntary work done together with other people. In a tradition similar to that of barn raising, community members meet to help an individual, or club members meet to build a clubhouse, arrange a flea market and so on. Participation in a dugnad most often involves a common meal, served by the host.

I was fascinated as the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head and commented to Annette and Camilla, " That would be a fantastic name for an arts collective "

And so, here I am. " I " being emphasized because I am only one for the moment. I would like to use this blog as a platform to explore some questions that I hope to pursue in my post-graduate work surrounding sustainable design and cross-discipline research/development.