Why the Cube? Part 3- To Infinite and Beyond

If you’ve been following the story of the cubes, you know they started as a meditative doodle, then became a method, and eventually developed into a language of their own. What I didn’t expect was how much life would shape them. In 2022, after years of teaching, loss, and stress, I had to hit pause. That pause brought me back to the cubes in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

After struggling with burnout, family deaths, and anxiety, I took a stress leave from teaching. I needed the world to stop. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster of endless loops and desperately needed to get off. Teaching during COVID was indescribable. The constant pivoting, adapting, and revising turned the rollercoaster of my personal life into a haunted house for my career. Even today, I still feel the impact of those years.

During my stress leave, I struggled to keep myself busy and started taking random commissions to give my days some structure. While waiting for one painting to dry, I allowed myself to play, revisiting old artworks, reworking ideas, and returning to the cube. In those quiet, unstructured moments, I realized the cube had become more than a shape. It was a way to think, feel, and make sense of my work.

The cube has grown with me over the years. What started as a simple doodle is now the structure behind almost everything I create. Working in cubes lets me break things down and rebuild them, allowing me to explore memory and emotion without needing a perfect plan. I layer colour like layering thoughts, one small square at a time, until it turns into something unexpected. The cube gives me a place to explore chaos while still feeling grounded.

Reworking an old painting- part 1

Reworking an old painting- part 2

As that grounding returned, so did a bit of confidence. After spending weeks reacquainting myself with paint and slowly shaking off the imposter syndrome that had been sitting on my shoulder, I finished a piece that actually felt like me. On a whim—equal parts bravery and “why not”—I decided to submit it to a juried show.

While applying to shows, I met the team at the Guelph Arts Council and applied to their Emerging Artist Mentorship Program. After being accepted, I worked with wonderful people who encouraged my creativity, and I eventually had a piece accepted into a juried show in Etobicoke.

"Beginning" accepted into Colour and Form Society’s 70th Annual Open Juried Exhibition

Members of the 2022 GEAMP program

Exhibition image of the final GEAMP show

After that, everything happened quickly. I was hired for a programming position covering a maternity leave at the Guelph Arts Council, working directly with artists and promoting art within my community. Through this position, I realized that while I loved helping people make art, I needed to pursue my own work more intentionally.

That is when I began trying to solve my biggest artistic challenge: how to combine cubes and landscapes.

During the years of drifting in and out of working with the cube, I never stopped painting. I created small en plein air landscapes during camping trips. In 2017 my husband suggested painting our adventures as a keepsake, so he bought me a small travel paint kit and book. I have been painting our camping trips ever since.

Fast forward to 2023, I started breaking down the colours of the landscapes I loved and using the cubes as vessels to hold them. I fell in love with capturing the essence of a landscape without including the actual visual references. I began experimenting with using cubes to draw shapes, inspired by the movement of water, exploring themes of depression and sadness.

As each new experiment was completed, I slowly built confidence and momentum, and success followed. The depth of my work grew alongside it.

A pivotal moment came during one of my last visits with my grandma in the care home after her memory had become inconsistent. I brought my laptop to show her photos from my latest camping trip because she was the one who introduced me to canoeing. During that visit, I was devastated when I could not reach her. The blankness on her face and the searching in her eyes as she tried to place who I was broke me. I was a stranger to her, a familiar stranger at moments when she smiled with flickers of recognition, but still without memory.

Since that visit in 2021, I have been quietly grappling with what this might mean for me and my future. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. My great-grandmother also experienced it before her passing. I found myself unconsciously taking more photos and writing things down. I went to therapy for grief after my grandma’s death, but I was also processing my own acceptance of what might lie ahead. I researched memory loss, read about why we forget, and learned how emotional resonance can increase the details we retain. I explored family stories and revisited old pictures and memories.

And I continued to paint.

Suddenly, everything made sense. Capturing my camping trips, abstracting colours to express my emotions, and the reason behind it all was to remember.

Many people want to leave a legacy, whether local, regional, or national, for friends, family, or children. We pay attention to the rich and famous because everyone knows who they are, while we live our daily lives forgetting that we are our own local heroes.

I create and remember not to leave a legacy, but in hopes that I can remind myself of who I am if I follow the genetic path laid before me. In the last year, I have begun writing down every material I use, keeping notes of my thoughts while I paint, leaving myself reviews of materials I have tried, and documenting my creative process as much as possible. Perhaps I can remind myself of what I have done, and give myself a road map for how I create so I can keep making art even if I forget how.

It is funny because after writing these three parts exploring why the cube, I realized that my process is closer to Sol LeWitt than I ever expected. He created instructions for others to make his artwork, while I create instructions so I do not forget how to make mine.

The cube has been with me through doodles, experiments, and personal upheavals. It is more than a shape. It is a way to process life, colour, and memory. Looking back on its journey, I see how much it mirrors the way I move through life: one small step at a time, building something larger from what feels chaotic in the moment. That is what makes this work meaningful to me and why I keep returning to it.