bio

 

Born in Vancouver, Canada to a french linguist and an italian-american cultural historian. This is a very short description of their qualities. For some years we lived in a Nisga’a village in the forest of northern BC. Ancient modern culture in creative action. There was k’ayukws (hard dried smoked salmon) and kool-aid (a powdered drink). We never had a TV but at friend’s houses I also met wonder woman and other culture heroes. Encountered art in the form of transformation masks, poles, and an esthetic soulful sense of living. Grizzly bears, wolves and birds and mosquitoes live in the Nass valley. There is a giant lava bed covered in thick lichen and moss. It is in the mountains. There is wild food. There is the river that moved when the volcano erupted, and snow. My mother speaks several languages, I just have a couple and a half. Elements are present in my work.

Have lived in Gitlaxt’aamiks, in Victrola, in Paris for seven years, in Seattle, in Vancouver, on Vancouver Island, on Lummi Island, and passed in and out of Oaxaca, New York, and Timbuktu. Co-author with poet Ted Joans of Our Thang (Ekstasis Editions 2001). Have lived on the windward side of a wild bird hospital outside San Francisco, and on a bit of sand between Humboldt Bay and the Pacific Ocean, as a practicing Surrealist. Have washed oiled ducks, geese, pelicans, fulmars, grebes, gulls, murres, auklets, herons and aquatic turtles. Draw every day. Co-founder of nonprofit Bird Ally X, direct care and rehabilitation of injured birds and other wildlife.

Drawing on the north coast of California, where the redwoods fog up the sea.

 

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