Unless

2023–2024
Mixed media sculpture / environmental data
Unless is a series of sculptural cloud forms generated from extreme weather data recorded across Canada in 2023—a year marked by record-breaking wildfire, rainfall, flooding, drought and temperature events.
Each work begins with a specific dataset. Recorded conditions are translated into organic shapes, removing the information from the familiar visual language of charts and graphs and transforming it into something physical, colourful and deliberately alluring.
The resulting objects are glossy, luminous and often playful. Their appearance sits in tension with the events embedded within them: record rainfall in Halifax, flooding in Quebec, drought and wildfire in British Columbia, extreme cold in Newfoundland and other moments of environmental disruption.
That contradiction is intentional.
We encounter an enormous amount of environmental information through headlines, statistics, maps and increasingly dramatic imagery. Individual numbers can feel definitive while simultaneously telling only a fragment of a much larger story. In Unless, data is not presented as an answer or an argument. It becomes a point of departure—something to look at differently and become curious about.
The cloud form reinforces that ambiguity. Clouds are familiar, beautiful and constantly changing, but they can also signal forces far larger than themselves. Likewise, the seductive surfaces of these sculptures invite viewers closer before revealing the less comfortable information beneath them.
The series asks what happens when environmental data is encountered first through beauty, material and curiosity rather than explanation—and whether that shift can create space to look again at information we might otherwise pass by.