Keira McArthur

For Fran, 1936-2022.

tangled stories can turn into useful things like a baby’s quilt, or carrot ginger soup. I Unpack the puzzle pieces and lay them out where I can see them, imagine them entwined, differently, in a new conversation.

Winds push the leaves around like dancers at a grand ball so the sunlight sweeps over my walls and the backyard trees sway dramatically at the back window. The prevailing westerlies far above this blow a ceiling of bruised-bellied clouds eastward until they gather their heavy and position themselves just so, a stillness-before, an intake […]

But there’s …more. Feels like there’s more that I can’t quite see from here.

I read stories these days of people who are leaving bad jobs, tired relationships, selling house and/or business and hitting the road in trailers or camper vans: conscious, well-considered decisions to unhook from old programming and step forward into a new sense of freedom. That can mean anything.

Ah the warm golden morning sun, full on my face. This apartment, where I’ve lived and worked through thirty months of this Hamilton Residency experiment has housed me gracefully and generously. There’s enough space here to hang a show of twenty-one smaller pieces and several more larger ones. There are two beautiful trees in the […]

The Artist talk for my Conversation Pieces July 2021 show is all around me in …pieces. A story about my Dad, a memory from the Mary Schneider School of Art at age 13. Some bits about Toxic Ego Art I encountered at York University in the early 80s, and how for a long tragic time […]

I take the world’s floods and fires, the sick ash trees in my beloved forest, the fighting and looting, the art show I’m doing everything I can to launch and support myself with in pandemic times – I take all of this and my fumbling, hot, rash-covered body to the lake, and I weep.

This new website feels like a new house to me. I’m finding new rooms to work in every time I upload material, and my library of photo stories is still here to dip in to when needed.

It moves as I do, grows as I do. I’m overjoyed.