September Talk About, topic: “Where do you draw your inspirations for creating from?”

Early on I’ve always felt a bit displaced.. not of ‘this’ world. My inspiration has always come from this other place. Along the way I’ve come across or have been introduced to people, musicians, artists, writers that remind me of this other worldliness.
Karl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell, Jamake Highwater, Norton Juster’s- The Phantom Tollbooth, Tove Jansson’s- Moominland Midwinter (I want to go fishing with Tooticky!), Tolkien, The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis.

An uncle of mine was an undersea photographer in the 70’s. He worked for the US parks and services and went out on the Calypso quite often. He would visit bringing stories, amazingly beautiful gigantic colour photographs, interesting shells, etc., and share them with me. I was fascinated and wanted to dive with my uncle and Jacques Cousteau. I wanted to live in this undersea world I was learning about… As a child, pretending I was a scientist I would wade through local marshes and creek beds collecting tadpoles, frogs whatever I could find to bring home and watch grow (to my Mother’s dismay). I always had smelly Sea Monkey tanks on the go, and was super happy spending hours looking at water droplets, blades of grass, or whatever else I could literally dig up, under my microscope.
Later I would hitchhike to tide pools off of Bolinas, or Drake’s Beach (I grew up in the SF Bay Area) and spend hours observing the life forms. I was a full on nerd.
I’ve always listened to music that was not popular with my friends; Tomita, Klaus Schulze

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Synergy (Larry Fast), later Brian Eno.. electronic, and ambient music of the 70’s. My father inspired this!
I recently found a list online- I still own every one of these LP’s! But now, thankfully have the majority on my iPod. Check ’em out here! Something else my dad brought home, along with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon- when it was first released, was HR Giger’s Necronomicon. It was and remains dark, but these crazy strange images inspired a whole other realm of exploration for me. Wow, the mid 70’s..
I’m a huge fan of sci-fi novels (some listed above), and films. Several films that embedded themselves forever in my psyche are Fantastic Planet

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Silent Running, and Logan’s Run. Yeah, well what can I say? Watch them and you will see how they’ve filled my work.
In elementary school and middle school I spent hours developing story boards, collecting sounds with my tape recorder, and drawing worlds I imagined and dreamed of.

Thankfully I am still doing all of this today (on a much larger scale) with my partner Andrei Gravelle (Snufkin)- who is the technical director of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Andrei and I have worked on several art installations together, creating soundscapes and interactive electronic pieces. Andrei is a huge inspiration! He is a musician, audio engineer, photographer, and just darned handy! 😉
I should add that he is also extremely supportive of me and all of my mad undertakings, aspirations and general craziness.
So, music greatly informs my work. Without it I believe I would find it difficult to travel into ‘the Zone’ of my other worldliness. I am still listening to 70’s electronica however new musical finds keep be added to the list:
The Orb
FSOL

Matmos
Bjork
Pete Namlook
Bill Laswell

Bola
Monolake
Ochre
Autechre
Drexciya
Boards of Canada
DJ Spooky
Peripherique
Philip Glass
Pole
John Cage
Popol Vuh
Legowelt
Mum
Four tet
Aquasky

I’ll stop there for now..
Meanwhile, please check out these other HandMade Division Artists and what, inspires their creative process.
Andes Cruz
Susan Moloney
Alice Istanbul
Rebekah Meddles (Lunasa Designs Jewelry)
Jewelry by Natsuko
Bella-Bijou Jewellery
Beth Cyr
ArtJewel Designs
Lisa Hopkins Design
Thomasin Durgin
Abhaya Fibers