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Through this project I wanted to imagine a collective emotional consciousness, similar to what is theorized in the complex social culture of sperm whales. I wanted to imagine that we could not only empathize with one another but have a shared sense of self. What would it look like if there was something beyond physical or verbal intimacy? Would hurting, loving, and feeling together bring comfort or destruction? Perhaps connection could be enough to provide hope for survival. I wonder if care could extend beyond an action into a state of being, so we would never truly be alone.

“Real Men Feel No Pain” involves projection, stillness, and country music, to question cultural patriarchy and the social acceptance of gendered, private affect. To quote Bell Hooks, “The masculine pretence is that real men feel no pain. The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel”." I hope to question “acceptable” vulnerability in the search for non-gendered intimacy.

“The choreography of patriarchy, this unholy fusion of love, loss, and violence, spares no one…

I want to change the dance.”

            -Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?

Patriarchal values are at the core of gendered violence and oppression. Patriarchal values of dominance are destructive to all people (regardless of gender identity), as they actively subordinate qualities that represent the “feminine” while valuing the “masculine”.

Synchronized swimming is a microcosm of patriarchal gender ideals. It is a world built on specific rules. These unwritten rules are apparent to those within the sport, and project a controlled, feminine image. Through a series of Subversive Synchro videos, I aim to challenge these ideals, expressing discontent with patriarchal gender binaries.

Each of these videos challenge certain “rules” of synchronized swimming, while bouncing between isolation and connection. These rules address presentation to the audience, correct lines, clean choreography, effortless swimming, and ideal bodies. To break these rules, the movement choreography is sometimes soft, sometimes severe, and rejects the traditional audience. The installation addresses a critical juxtaposition found by those involved in this niche sport. The videos are beautiful but contain raw movements that don’t have a place in competitive sport. They embrace the sense of “sisterhood” that myself and others have found in this sport community. However, they address the ways competitive synchronized swimming imposes patriarchal ideals upon young people. This is something I personally struggle with and wish to challenge through the creation of a new opportunity for movement. This opportunity involves a space that can embrace beauty and sisterhood of water-based choreography in a more expressive, critical, feminist way.

Installations of the video work “At Dawn, I Will Win”

-Reeling: Dancing on Screen, a film festival by Mile Zero Dance, Edmonton, AB, Sept. 15-22, 2018

-Nuit Blanche Regina, Regina, SK, Sept. 29, 2018

-Saskatchewan Fashion Week 2019, Regina, SK, May 9-11, 2019

The piece, At Dawn, I Will Win, is a video installation, exploring the movement of bodies in water, to address the shared experience of gender-based oppression. The piece is intended to challenge the viewer to consider how widely accepted historical art has been built on the objectification of women. The use of embroidery also signals an important metaphor in the piece. Much like the dismissal of embroidery as “women’s work”, women’s voices, experiences and emotions are too often dismissed on a daily basis. However, the video invokes an image of hope through this shared experience, through bodies guiding each other to the surface. By reclaiming the lyric, “At Dawn, I Will Win”, an English translation from Nessun Dorma (the famous aria by Puccini in Turandot), I hope to subvert the text and turn it into a feminist mantra. Although as women we continue to face a society that denies our voices, we are strong enough to pull each other up. There is solidarity born from facing daily oppression. Just as the women in the video are physically connected, so are we through shared experience. This piece allows a place to challenge our history, acknowledge our present and offer an empathetic future.

As survivors, our voices contain the language of resistance. Voices that have been silenced, dismissed and ignored for too long. Due to feelings of shame, humiliation or fear, over 80% of sexual assault victims do not report to the authorities (University of Alberta, 2015). With its roots in my personal efforts to navigate the aftermath of my assault, this exhibition is the culmination of my search for voice. I found my own, my great-grandmother’s and those of a few brave women who chose to share with me. These voices have built into an overwhelming mass to fill the lacuna of a lost history of survivors. In the words of Tracy Emin, “I start with myself and end up with the universe” (Brown, 2006).

 The bathtub encompasses the horror of trauma – the disassociation, fear, and loneliness that fills its silence. I could float in the tub, completely untethered. In a world that feels frozen and distant, here I could feel. I could let go of all the tears that I could not cry in front of others. I could wash, a desperate attempt to feel clean again. To feel like me. There is a lingering violence in the unsaid, as I have felt the unspoken actions of my rape haunting me. In the stillness hangs the words of Dr. Laura Brown:

 “These experiences are not unusual, statistically; they are well within the ‘range of human experience.’ They are the experiences of most of the women who come into my office every day. They are experiences that could happen in the life of any girl or woman in North America today. They are experiences to which women accommodate; potentials for which women make room in their lives and their psyches. They are private events, sometimes known only to the victim and perpetrator” (Brown, 2015).

 As I began to access the language to discuss my personal trauma, I opened my practice up to the experiences of others. These voices ranged from the daily violence of cat-calling shared over a community stitching group to more gut-wrenching private interviews. The importance of feminist research methods rings true here, the need for story-telling as activism.

Our experiences are folded into the act of embroidery. A skill that was passed down to me from my great-grandmother, embroidery holds a history of women’s work and calls for empathy and care through each stitch. This technique brings in the voice of my great-grandmother, of generations of women who have suffered their own trauma.

 The final gesture of this exhibition is the shout. The video acts as both poetry and activism, as it challenges our societal notions of what “normal sexual assault” looks like through the use of embodied affect. In our current political climate, art is necessary to explore the ugliness that accompanies gender-based oppression. The rawness of trauma. We deserve a place to embrace negative affect through feeling uncomfortable, angry, sad and confused. These emotions are as valuable as reason and thought, as valuable as hope and optimism. I want to embrace negative affect to propel change.

 This exhibition is an investigation, an exploration, a journey. I want you to question your own experiences, to listen to others and to feel less alone than I did. Rape is a tool of patriarchal power, but we, the survivors, are stronger.

Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 100-112. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Accessed September 24, 2015.

 Brown, Neal. Tracey Emin. London: Tate Publishing, 2006.


University of Alberta. “Understanding Sexual Assault.” Accessed November 3, 2015. https://uofa.ualberta.ca/current-students/sexual-assault-centre/understanding-sexual-assault.

Solo Exhibition at the FemLab Gallery at the University of Alberta

A collection of embroidery works done in collaboration with fashion designer Katherine Sthamann. Shown at Saskatchewan Fashion Week 2015. 

A collection of work from my BFA graduating exhibition entitled These Histories of Mine. Shown at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in 2013 as a part of the group graduating exhibition entitled Fruition.