About

Paintings, Prints, & Illustration

My practice explores the politics of scale, sentimentality, and domestic aesthetics through highly detailed miniature oil portraits of anthropomorphized characters. Within ornate vintage and thrifted frames, I depict wild creatures in Victorian clothing. Rabbits wear tailored coats, bears are crowned with flowers, fish wear monocles, placing the untamed within the visual language of restraint and social performance.

These figures exist in a space of contradiction. Their fur, feathers, and fins signal instinct, autonomy, and wildness. Their garments signify etiquette, social hierarchy, and gendered expectation. The wild body is dressed for approval. This tension is deeply personal to me.

Raised within an orthodox faith tradition that required women to dress according to strict codes of modesty, I learned that clothing could function as moral language, shaping how I was seen, and how I saw myself. I often felt like a wild thing wearing another species’ garments. I performed acceptability while sensing something instinctual beneath the surface. In my paintings, animals inhabit that same threshold: poised, composed, adorned, they are captured in a portrait, yet unmistakably untamed.

Working in miniature is deliberate. What began as a way to paint while on tour as a JUNO Award–winning musician, evolved into something far more meaningful. Historically, small-scale, highly detailed painting has been associated with intimacy and domesticity, modes which are often deemed secondary to monumental, masculine traditions of scale and spectacle. By embracing miniature oil portraiture in ornate frames, I explore the reclamation of smallness as a site of focus and power. Viewers must lean in. They must slow down. They must pay attention. The act of viewing becomes an experience I, as the artist, control. This is a space I offer for intimate engagement with my work and in doing so, allow the viewer to reenter the larger world with renewed awareness, considering the vastness around them while noticing the smaller, often unseen details that shape it.

Sentimentality is similarly reclaimed. What is often dismissed as decorative or quaint becomes, in my work, a vehicle for critique. Nostalgia functions as both comfort and constraint. The domestic aesthetic becomes both refuge and accusation.

My artistic lineage informs this approach. My great-great-aunt, Anna Dixon (1873–1959), the Scottish painter and President of the Scottish Society of Women Artists from 1930 to 1942, worked within structures that limited women’s participation in the art world, yet persisted in painting small landscapes, birds and animals, and figures with authority. Three of her small watercolour sketches hang in my workspace. Their modest scale and assured presence has shaped my understanding that artistic devotion can coexist with femininity, and that domestic proximity does not diminish creative ambition.

I work within the rhythms of family life. My studio exists alongside my roles as mother and partner, not separate from them. The miniature format accommodates these interwoven responsibilities, while conceptually mirroring them. My work is careful, precise, and is often overlooked, made up of small acts of unseen labour that have great impacts and carry immense meaning in the wider world.

Through this miniature oil painting series, for the past fifteen years I have explored what has historically been considered insignificant, sentimental, or decorative, asking viewers to reconsider what power really is, where it resides, and how smallness, intimacy, and wildness captured in a frame can be forms of resistance in their own right.