Keira McArthur

We were told three days ago that the water will not run in our taps until the end of April.  I feel relief.  It’s good to know – that we are directly linked to the spring thaw, that we need to build the gathering and conservation of water into our daily routine, that we will […]

I’ve had sleepovers in three different friend’s houses now, and one at my studio.  The houses I’ve stayed at in town play constant musical obsessive repetitive drips in counterpoint to their ticking analogue clocks. Our entire small city shares the consequences of too-shallow water mains and fast-creeping frost. We are either frozen here, or dripping […]

and taps silent, the flow of human traffic increases.  I’m fascinated. It is a commitment of time and effort that would otherwise go unnoticed, this answering of the need for water. As the days go by a growing awareness of value. Mindful conservation where before there was only entitlement. I cleaned the kitchen this morning […]

…dear Minus 25 Degrees Celsius, dear 70 km ph Winds and your Death-chill-Factor, Thank you for finding a way to freeze a substantial part of the city’s water system – at the very point in our heavy winter when we collectively agree to become grumpy that the world is not green and growing. The first […]

I remember walking through the trail at Skinner’s Bluff one fine September day, so happy to be breathing in the beauty and wilderness there that clock-time ceased to exist. Dusk came and I was still hours away from where I’d parked. Since the forest there stretches for 2000 acres, my only safe option was to […]

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 […]

There are other placemats, floor mats and surprise things currently in production, but further work on these has been temporarily eclipsed by painting and music deadlines.  I’ll be back at it shortly! Here is the functional work that is ready and available to buy right now: Here’s how to buy it:  three options (so far): […]

I want to write. There is much change filtering through the waters of late January, and I find myself at odds with the urge to name, record, describe.  The feeling is that if I narrow my focus I will miss something crucial on the periphery of my vision.  Because of this, my urge to articulate […]

Drippy Sunday morning; the world outside has shrunk …which appropriately rhymes with Funk, because Funk is precisely what I’m in. … niggly, prickly snappish me with a million essential things to attend to but instead I chop a fridge full of vegetables and chicken into tiny tiny pieces, beat up a dozen eggs, fry severed […]

I stare at the handle of a red screwdriver and use my ears to see the space around me.  There are tires scribing the wet street three floors down; the clock ticks each second in counterpoint to the keys on my laptop.  Furnace just kicked in like a huge breathing thing acres wide and deep; […]

in the approach to Christmas 2014…

Snow is both light and heavy, slow and fast, visible and not. It’s a season of contrast. I live in a Canadian province that stretches from Windsor/Detroit (on a latitudinal par with Northern California) to Hudson’s Bay – a stretch between 42 and 57N; from carolinian forest to tundra – “Ontario is Canada’s second largest […]