Bittersweet presents selected artworks from an earlier grant project that expanded my artistic practice and fostered artistic collaborations with 3 Deaf artists. I wanted to push out of my own box, creatively expand into different mediums, textures, and approaches in my work. Using four areas of creative research, I dove into themes of whimsy, humour, grief, anger, pain, and an evolving identity.

Wynne Paquette is an artist based in Guelph, Ontario, whose work in oil paint and cold wax centers on expressive, atmospheric landscapes. Through a process of layering, scraping, and rebuilding the surface, Paquette creates tactile compositions where vibrant colour and texture work together to evoke both energy and quiet reflection.

My work emerges from experiences of foreignness shaped by living in multiple countries. While movement has offered growth and adaptation, it has also created a sense of displacement. Rooted in childhood road trips, car travel became a constant connecting past, present, and future. Seen from behind the steering wheel, the work explores roads and transitional landscapes as metaphors for memory, migration, and emotional transition through atmosphere, light, and weather.

I think about the vast sky, of the compost pile we stash along the laneway, I think about the new woodpile and butterfly season. But looking at those two-day lilies that have found a home amongst the buckthorn, goldenrod and wild roses, I think mostly about a story my mom tells. The one about her cousin stopping by the farm on his bike - and picking a bouquet of lilies from the garden bed for his date. These stories help build the memory of this place...

28 Objects in 28 Days” is a painting series created over a single 28-day period. Each day, one ordinary object was selected and painted, using a deliberately limited palette: seven colours in total (though rules were broken in one painting). This constraint mirrors the rhythms, expectations, and negotiations that often define women’s lives.