Why the cube? Part 2: the In-between Years

In Part 1, I shared how the cubes began, born from a mix of frustration, curiosity, and Sol LeWitt-inspired experimentation. But like many beginnings, that spark faded for a while.

After undergrad, the cubes' evolution was stunted for some time. Teachers College and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Gallery and Museum Studies left the cubes on the edges of my notes, literally.

Lecture Note Doodles, 2014

Lecture Note Doodles, 2014

The meditative nature and unconscious movement aided in my success with note-taking. It’s funny how we learn to learn almost too late in our education. To this day, when I am at workshops or conferences, you will find me sketching the cube while jotting down key phrases and ideas as I learn.

While I was working on my post-grad diploma, I audited a printmaking class. There, I fell in love with the process of lithography and was introduced to screen printing. During my audit, I was still experimenting with “my style.” I remember my first lithography print was a whale diving into the abyss. My instructor was not in love with the imagery. My next print had to include a reduction of the first, and I came back to the cube. My instructor was thrilled and encouraged me to only do cubes for future prints.

It was the first time someone outside myself saw something distinct in the cubes, and that encouragement stayed with me even after the semester ended. For a few months, I dove into the cube through the lens of lithography, experimenting with various techniques and focusing less on the imagery and more on the process itself (a hint of what was to come).

First lithograph, "Into the Abyss"

Coloured Lithograph, Draft pull

2016 Print Show, Georgian College

However, the semester came to an end, and for several years the cube was just doodles in my notes. I would casually come back to the cube when making art for my first shared apartment with a boy (my now husband), and I proudly carried my fourth-year art of cubes and tape doodles between two apartments and a house. But it wasn’t until Covid that I started to come back to the cube again.

During my first five years of teaching in galleries and schools, I had started to accumulate a variety of half-finished artworks that I began as examples for my classes. Now, stuck at home and miserably failing at teaching online, I took it upon myself to “finish” this pile of half-baked artworks.

During this time period, I started experimenting with colour theory, painting techniques, and abstraction, with the cube as the medium for my madness. I also experimented with landscapes, taught myself watercolour, and transformed the walk-in-closet-sized spare bedroom into my studio.

Covid Painting #1

Covid Painting #2

Covid Painting #3

Between 2014 and 2022, the cube was my home away from home. It was something that I could always come back to, consciously and unconsciously. It was a shape that I could abandon and revisit whenever I needed, familiar enough that I could draw it with ease, but complex enough that it allowed for variation, deconstruction, and transformation.

By the time the world reopened, the cube had transformed from a doodle into a language of its own, one that would soon shape my current body of work.