About me
I’m an artist and designer based in Victoria, British Columbia.
My path to art had a few detours
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. - Joseph Campbell
I've always thought of myself as an artist, but rarely said it out loud. At every fork in the road, I made practical choices. That served me well, but didn't leave a lot of time for art. In 2022, I gratefully retired from the tech industry to follow my heart and work on my art full-time. Not as practical, not as lucrative, but soul-nourishing.
My path to that decision was a winding one. When I was young, I was convinced that I would be an artist. But I was also attracted to technical problems. So, ever the pragmatist, trying to straddle two worlds, I studied mass media at Simon Fraser University in the late 90s. The dotcom boom pulled me into tech, and I spent many years as a developer.
Wanting to work more on the design side of tech, I went back to school to study art and design at North Island College. My timing was lucky, and I was able to shift into a long and happy career in design and UX.
To complicate the story, in the mid 2000s, I started a side hustle called Tricksy Knitter, designing knitting patterns and products. I never meant it be much more than a hobby, but it grew and grew. I even wrote two books for Penguin Books, Idiot’s Guide to Knitting (2013) and Idiot’s Guide to Knitting Sweaters (2015). Tricksy Knitter became a thriving small business, that I juggled alongside my "real" career.
I'm grateful for each branch of the path that brought me here. Juggling a mix of art, craft, UX, and tech was a big part of my work ethic for a long time. (Did I mention I'm an over achiever?) But in 2022, I knew it was time to listen to my heart and follow my bliss to focus on the creative.
So you may know me as a UX manager, a knitter, a weirdo, but here I am, semi retired, in my sweet little home studio, drawing pictures of lichen and talking animals and dreams and anything else that comes to mind.