June 2008

In my current work I am exploring, through the use of pencil crayon and oil pastels, the intimate and portable work that women have always carried close at hand to work on in spare moments.

My quilts and table coverings are drawn rather than sewn, but the tools and techniques used are similarly time consuming. The process is slow and orderly - layers are scratched through - water is added to intensify colour - fragments are later pieced together.

Crow visitors appear in some of the pieces - spirits of playfulness, cheekiness, forthrightness - spirit visitors from the past - a remembering of friends or family members. In mythology and folklore as a whole, crows tend to be symbolic of the spiritual aspect of death, or the transition of the spirit into the afterlife.

These explorations express a distillation of what captures my interest in ordinary events, an ordering of these elements, and the pleasure taken in small delights in the midst of chaos or tedium.

Colleen Couves