Objects, particularly the ones that are easily dismissed in the bustle of our everyday lives, have always captured my attention. As a child I remember hunting around my suburban neighborhood looking for interesting scraps of discarded items. I loved to gather them up, looking past the items intended purpose, using them instead as my creative fodder for making something new and different.

The inspiration I experienced from interacting with certain objects developed into a desire to create objects of my own. In clay I found the accessibility and malleability I desired. This led me to accept a pottery apprenticeship and to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The same years I devoted to my ceramics education I also began exploring the back yard of British Columbia, my home province. Nature made objects became my muse. I wanted to incorporate the beautiful bits of natural debris that I encountered in the rain forests in my functional ceramic work. The textures of these objects impressed in the clay offered a satisfying, immediate and permanent echo of the natural world.

In 2004, life changes brought me to Fort McMurray, a mining city in northern Alberta. Here I have been heavily influenced by the unique characteristics of my new environment. Human made, disposable items that have been fabricated to facilitate human activity began to dominate my imagination. In 2010, after a detour away from my creative work that lasted several years, I came across the relatively new innovation of precious metal clay. I quickly discovered that this material offered the perfect marriage of a craft that I knew with the exciting prospect of exploring the unfamiliar craft of silver smithing.

Today, the original jewelry that I create contrasts mundane objects of little value with fine silver, a precious metal that has always been of great value. For me, this contrast holds a subtle but provocative tension, one that questions what we value and why. I now find my inspiration in the local hardware store, kitchen supply store, dollar store, antique shop and scrap metal yard where I study human made objects. It is the textures from these treasures, their patterns and shapes that form my jewelry. The result is modern, unique pieces of wearable art that illustrate there is beauty in the everyday.