Keira McArthur

For Fran, 1936-2022.

I had such a great plan, before CoVid-19 changed us. A working car-trip across Canada to Banff residency in the summer or fall (Banff is of course now closed, all programs cancelled into early fall), an artist residency in the Shetland Islands for a month, where the shore meets the land and the land calls […]

I’m drinking beer in the solarium of a pub my band used to play in 35 years ago.  More nachos than I can eat, hanging baskets full of boston-themed plastic plants, my old cello safe and warm beside me. A guy with humperdink-voice just started to play a three chord song – now I get why, […]

I wake among the starlings, deep inside their morning discussion, which centres mostly on comings and goings.  It’s a boisterous, cultural ballyhoodle, ritualized by the turning of the year. Starlings time their arrivals and departures here to the spring and fall equinox, just as we do our school years, our arts industry seasons, interesting.  I […]

I hold Red in my mind and thoughts rise like bubbles. They’re not what I expect. This decision is rooted in fear. I’m stuck in Repeat. I’m bored. Confined.  categorized, manipulated, abused, constricted, driven, exhausted, worried, overstressed, coping. Aren’t we all to some extent.  And isn’t this an essential part of the story. Then another thought rises (after […]

I’ve been ill and intensely insomnia’d recently – slowed down enough to obligingly revise my to-do lists from twenty things to one – or two if the gods are smiling.  In the in-between times, too tired to sleep or read or write or hold a thought long enough to notice what it is …. I’ve been […]

First snow of the winter, we take a break and make double spirals on the soft wet of the roof, catch fat snowflakes on our faces, delighted again by the magic of change. Inside, the bells ring on… Metal on bell metal, glass on glass.  These sounds mark our hours, births, weddings, deaths.  They chime at our […]

stare and stare at these paintings, make a choice to add paint, increase opacity, move a line, stare again and question and re-form my understanding of the work and my own approach to collaboration – what is changing?  why and how the change?  How can I follow – willingly submit to change myself, when I cannot see the future? […]

Summer grows into Autumn. In two weeks I play cello for these, and for Gloria and the Oboe Concerto in F (more info here); it’s good to have such a soundtrack to live and work by.  Thank you, Vivaldi, for composing this music 300 years ago. I listen to II mvt of the Oboe concerto as […]

3:56am, sweatered on the couch with the green blanket tucked around my legs. I can’t see them, but I am aware physically and psychologically that I have good, warm slippers on my feet, and that they are a deep, warm pink. In a moment I will pull the reliable stapler out of my purse, turn […]

in the approach to Christmas 2014…

These days begin in darkness and wet. We live in multiple layers of clothing against the cold damp of constant seeping rain, walk under umbrellas, and peek out from under shelter until some blue sky appears. Then we breathe the blue and the coloured leaves, and roll in the damp ones underfoot.  We go to […]