Artist’s Statement: I was born in Oshawa, Canada in 1970 where my father worked in General Motors. When my brother was born a few years later, we moved north to Scugog Island, to a farm where my father kept his airplane, and he flew all the time as a bush pilot in and out of lakes. My grandfather also had an airplane and so did my dad’s two brothers. It was expected of me that I would be a pilot as well, but I wanted to build and make things. I used whatever I could find on the farm to build forts and I would draw pictures on old pieces of wood and paper that were left on the farm from the old owners. It was at this time when I started to create the world, filled with the charters in my pictures that I still draw. My people were often way off in the fields in my pictures. I would put my brother and me in the pictures a lot, and my father is always in his plane. My family was always extremely cheap, so I learned I had to salvage all materials or else I couldn’t do anything so as I grew up and had my own place. When I moved out on my own when I was 18, back to Oshawa, I obsessively collected stuff. I am a pack-rat. My brother moved in with me when he left home and we continued to make art on things we got from the garbage and we filled our place with hundreds of paintings. We were discovered by a local artist who helped us get a show and from there we got two more shows and so on. We then moved on to Toronto where we lived together until we outgrew our apartment and were kicked out for filling it full of wood and lots of other things collected from the garbage. We then both moved out onto our own into garages. I am driven by the materials I collect. I can’t leave something that I think is useful, I have to take it home, even if I don’t need it now. Especially pieces that I draw on like wood and now metal because I draw every day. I see things in the materials. The surfaces that I am drawn to tell me what to draw. They reveal a world to me I recognize. So a few years ago I bought a welder to build bicycles. I was obsessed with bikes. I started to use the welder to make lines on the metal and realized that I could draw with metal on metal. It’s been about 3 years of working with metal. I always do my art at night and collect stuff in the day. I have been surviving from the garbages my entire life and will probably always.