Keira McArthur

I want living people to buy work made by living artists because there is no moment like this, and together we tell the story of Now. What you pay for a piece is a measure of your love for human nature, for our collective insistence upon creativity, no matter what.

I wonder about Gifts of all kinds, about how and if we choose to receive them. Not prizes, rewards, entitlements or charity, but Gifts.
Something vulnerable and connective happens around them.
Something shifts. It’s always a story.

Join me in August 2025 at keiramcarthur.substack.com/podcast for a series of audio stories called Tales of Gifts and Wonder.

To meander is to slow down, to bend around things so as to know them, touch them gently before moving on through this curve to the next. It’s like a labyrinth, but also a passage through a place, a task – any experience, consciously or not. If it’s a deep curve, it will be overwhelming, a painful transformation. We have choice though, to resist, or go with the flow.

I know people as unstoppable and prolific as ragweed. I know mayflower people, bloodroot people, wild grape folk who can topple old tired structures with patience and determination. What if we blossom anyway amid the chaos, beautifully and defiantly, like plants do?

I feel very strongly that we can lean in here, and find ways to connect and support each other. We can trust what Leonard Cohen wrote in his anthem, about cracks.

A solid eighteen inches of snow since Saturday afternoon in the GTA. All available vehicles, from snowblowers through skid steers and pickups with plough attatchments to massive snowploughs all in 24-hour play on the roads.

You become a refugee who owns only what you can carry. What do you carry. Who is home. Where.

Trees are relational beings that are never solitary, always connected. The same is true of Humans. Thank you to everyone who toured the show, for your conversation and your sincere engagement. What a pleasure that was!

Tree Time opens like a chrysalis one month from now, at Cotton Factory’s Doors Open weekend. That just happens to be how long it takes a monarch caterpillar to dissolve into goo and re-imagine itself into a butterfly. Send me love please, and wish me well.

New perspectives too, washed clean by the emotional waves. I’m curious about the active differences between inheritance and legacy. Is it choice, I wonder. Also I wonder about the ideas we cling to as though they define us. They do not. Memory, like main stream media, is unreliable.

You have registered for Art Basics One, a practical, playful course for anyone who wants to stretch a little past what they know about materials, practice and the amazing gift-to-self that is art-making. This AB One session will fun from January 7 to February 25, 2024.

Registration was to begin today, on September 20, but as I was working away at the final details, something crashed, and the course disappeared.

Gulp.