Keira McArthur

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I’ve been dreaming poetic dreams of mycelium which is really thought connecting to thought through boundaries which are really just illusions.  I’ve been coiled and waiting like a pike in the hot weedy shallows, ready to spring at my duckling dinner.  Racing like a strong salmon through the lines and hooks that dangle my possible death, crawling like a crayfish […]

I went subterranean twelve weeks ago, maybe more.  Came up again two days ago, I think.  I know this because I found myself gardening yesterday. This was a tunnel of a place I’ve been in, a way into and through the deep, long list entitled Impossible-but-Necessary.  In twelve weeks strong and beautiful people died, shockingly, […]

The Harness is off.  It’s over there on the floor. Curious, to see this thing I’ve worn for 30+ years…  Who made it?  Why so tight?  Why the rough rope?  It’s ingenious, actually.  There’s a pull cord I see that will jab thumbtacks into my backside when I’m slowing down, and simultaneously tighten the collar […]

twenty extra minutes uphill, but it didn’t feel like it because of Dire Straits and Jake Coco.  In fact, my wings carried me up that hill in time with the music, and then I was soaring high high above everything where the horizon is curved, warm sun on my back. My theory is this:  I’m […]

It’s easy to deflate yourself when you’re making art. It’s not just art-making – it’s making anything, really if you are serious about doing it as your vocation.  Honestly, you ask yourself, who really cares whether this works or not?  The world will not stop spinning, the grass and the children will grow regardless of […]

Interesting, isn’t it, that we divide ‘commercial’ music from ‘real’ music?  When in fact all music is consumed, and all professional musicians are in the business of earning a living – no matter what genre they play in.  We say to our kids – no don’t be a musician, you’ll never make it, it’s too […]

Yesterday was requiem day as I worked in the studio, which seemed fitting, somehow.  Every layer of grief and joy is expressed and exposed in them – the Mozart, the Brahms, the Faure, the Rutter.  Outside my windows there raged a storm that tore hydro lines and uprooted trees – for a while my phone […]

Even the loud old fridge is drowned out by straight-down-rain.  Not sheets and thunder and driving – but a rain that will drench us for days, soaking the soil, swelling the creeks, rising the shoreline of Georgian Bay above the sad sorry rocks that appeared this spring, covering their nakedness once again.  It is 12 […]

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, […]

While Barak Obama was aging rapidly in the effort to deflect the great toxic nastiness of the 2012 US election and (hopefully!) emerge as President with some vestiges of grace, I was building, making, taking apart and putting together, writing and re-writing new art equations in my studio. Through Hurricane Sandy and my dad’s 80th […]

I’m home from playing the first concert of GBS’ 2012-2013 season, appropriately titled ‘A Sense of Place’ by our Maestro Mister Barnum.  Thanks, JB, for sitting me first desk celli, where the intensity & pressure is highest.  Lucky me – & I mean no sarcasm of any kind – it was stressful, exhausting, but there’s […]