Keira McArthur

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1200 kilometres and one bottle of all-night-long scotch later, a 10-man reggae band called The Human Rights comes to my house and after partying euphoric until almost daylight, drapes its multi-limbs over every available surface and falls asleep, still humming. Sometimes you just need a good shock to the system.  This makes it possible to change, […]

Unbelievably, I am reunited with my oldest love, after fourteen years. I was fifteen and vague with deep introversion when we came together.  I had no real tools other than my ears and a fierce invisible longing that Named Me, so I struggled as if blindfolded.  I didn’t know how to properly approach the impossible,  let […]

This wire is familiar – the one I’m down to.  Six paintings, eleven days – I’m now working on two at the same time. (also workshop and rehearse the Performance Piece for Opening night, compile the Book for #Selfie and make at least two.  Then my breaks:  three rehearsals, two concerts, teaching cello lessons and […]

I’ve known many…. The trick with the key, the turn of the doorknob, the double beat of the door closing – like permission to lay the day’s burden down.  I’ve had hollers from the back room, running tackles from the dog, slow blink from the cat – but always the awareness that time moves more […]

I’ve given myself two weeks to answer a list.  On my list are relatively small goals but they are necessarily comprehensive, since the overall aim is to break through a log jam of old unfulfilled ideas, to clear out what is no longer useful or appropriate, and give form to the ones with a vigorous […]

Open-faced and shovel-sore, I stare out the window at a thousand-thousand demons of whirling, whipped snow.  I think about beauty, and the job of art. If there can be a line we take towards healing the terrible distortions of our belief systems, I think it must be drawn by artists.  There can be no measured, […]

… but not yet in depth, about these paintings, this exhibition project.  If my mind were a light table, it would be stacked with disparate ideas superimposed one over the other  – I’m squinting to see what composite images appear from behind and through – negative and positive. A sample from the stack: the distorted […]

The clouds are pale indigo-violet, then a blustery bruised grey shot through with long warm lines of golden sunlight  and rich blue – this sets the red reds and the yellow yellows and the living greens in brilliant, stop-in-your-tracks collaboration.  I feel as though I’m watching the gods at play in a game where they […]

As a child I was terrified of snakes. Now I love them. The other side of the same fascination perhaps? We live right beside an old quarry, which garter snakes love. Last weekend though, this lady graced us with her presence.  she may have come to hunt garters, or mice, which we have in abundance. […]