It all started when…

Lori has been printmaking since 2019. Having studied and edited university courses, signing up for a beginner’s class in printmaking at SNAP that year seemed a natural turn, and one that spurred much more exploration and practice, especially in linocut and screen printing.

Around the same time, Lori started more regularly visiting a swimming friend with a substantial artist career behind her: Maureen Harvey. Lori took instruction from the lifetime artist and octogenarian muralist in drawing, composition, assemblage, and curation. Later, a week-long course with Lyndal Osborne helped Lori to think in terms of found matter used to depict meaning in ordinary objects.

Active in local community groups, and critical of regional political movements, Lori began exploring political expressions through printmaking and illustrating. She has created monotype prints in response to Athabasca University’s 2023 community-busting decisions, which reached upper level administration and came to align with (and encourage, perhaps) a change in internal politics. As part of a larger project with Alberta’s Energy Futures Lab, Lori-as-writer partnered with printmaker Heather Leier where they co-produced a poem and print piece critical of hypermasculinity in tar sands culture. In 2024, Debra Davidson, in writing about emotion and climate change, commissioned Lori’s art and illustrations to interpret her academic book.

New to printmaking and deeply caring about the land, people, and other-than-humans around her, Lori considers hope, despair, and the spaces in between. Installing her Dreamland Quilt in an outdoor forest gallery was an ethereal and decomposing call to comfort in surroundings. The piece contains birch bark harvested from firewood burned in the stove that heats Lori’s house and previously recorded dreams typed onto semi-transparent paper were applied.

Inspired by both Peter von Tiesenhausen’s deterioration of art in nature and Osborne’s found matter used to depict meaning in ordinary objects, Lori’s collection of prints and objects imagines the socio-politics of her surroundings. Both von Tiesenhausen and Osborne use repetition to point to minutiae and enormity and consider natural occurrences like growth, moving light, and wind currents in their work. Similarly, Lori views salvaged materials as parts to larger installations that also include prints.