Keira McArthur

Lunar Eclipse, good friends, Czech Porcelain from WWII, my uncertainty, The Starling on the wire. Today feels good.

…Fuelled by these wonders my work in studio has produced inks and fabric dyed with colours from ten different trees, a buffet of interesting resist experiments and paper dyed for book works.

Off-grid at the shore reminds me I’m tougher than I think. April’s like a magic pre-shoulder season secret – best time to cut the winter’s deadfall for the wood stove, to see the curve of the forest floor, and feel the full moonlight – silver – on my face. Cozy warm, writing and drawing in […]

Thoughts from the morning couch, while I watch them climb and trim one of my morning trees. It’s pretty drastic, what they’re doing. I do hope they’re not cutting it down entirely. Twenty years ago after my third solo show (Sea Hear) I meet the man who would become my husband, on the phone. He […]

These times.  Ukraine, Palestine, homeless people in our streets, broken hearts, and some folks just …stuck. I hear news like the hit and run death of Boris Brott and what was a level floor turns into a 45 degree pitch. We carry heavy things in these times and hearts are cracking open.  Steady on.  There […]

I’ve just read a useful description of art, especially for these times: that it is always an invitation to step back and observe the world from a different perspective. There are so many viewpoints from which to understand any given thing and most of the time we are too close to actually see, too busy […]

Equinox, and me so tight in the grip of this intense yearning. I want with all my heart to experience a big, booming rightness in us, as humans. A miracle of laying down of arms, of dropping our programmed, distorted behaviours. I ache in every cell of my being for us to be kind, to […]

Spring bird song, gentle grey sky, trees in a slow sway at their crowns. I’ve been to the studio to print my reference for the trees that line English Bay in Vancouver, those trees that populated my sunset meals last week – silhouettes against the golden light in a dance too slow for us to […]

It comes in Waves, and each wave is a new teacher. Is this Grief? In any case, these are deeply teachable moments for me. For weeks now I’ve experienced a considerable amount of pain in my left shoulder, especially intense as I lie down to sleep. Tendonosis, I’m told, by the physiotherapist. My tendons have […]

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.