KATHIE DUNCAN
Artist’s Statement
Over the past decade, my attitudes about painting and creativity in general, have changed a great deal. Ten years ago I had just graduated from my MFA studies and created pictures within the confusing margins of modernist arguments over what kind of painting was relevant Art. At the time the University of Alberta’s painting department still maintained somewhat of an emphasis on the early twentieth century concept of “reinventing the wheel”. And for someone with a lack of academic confidence regarding contributing to the debates of such issues, I did what I could to express myself in the grid and square patterned panels I produces at the time.
Since then much has changed in my life. I have become a wife and a mother. Throughout the five years when my children needed constant tending to, I could not paint. So I began to create Christmas ornaments, make clothing, do pottery, and research plants and gardening. And since I still harbored thoughts about creative hierarchies, I dove into these activities with all the freedom that came along with thinking that such outlets were not as important as the Art I had learned about in university.
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