ten feet of crazy energy: Miniature worlds

I have always loved dollhouses. Well, not dolls, just their houses; I made one out of an orange crate and populated it with stuffed mice in dresses. Possibly this is part of my Japanese DNA, since they were the first to miniaturize radios and pretty much everything else.

Imagine my great thrill to find that miniatures are actually an art form, as evidenced by the work of Bill Burns. I went to see his show, Safety Gear for Small Animals, and it was a fascinating combination of science, art and humour. Then I actually got to study with Bill, when he taught one semester at Emily Carr. I learnt that miniature artworks gave artists an opportunity to create and manipulate their own new worlds or imagined environments.

For my current show at the Britannia Art Gallery, I had the chance to make some miniature sculptures. The show is called The Process of Painting, and Lisa Ochowycz and I documented our painting stages in order to give the viewer a better idea of what goes into the creation of a painting. I riffed on this idea for the sculptures in a more humourous way, playing with scale and making painting a more Herculean task.