{I wanted this piece to remind me (and all of you!) that things will undoubtedly look very bleak sometimes. But that beautiful optimistic Spring is hopefully just around the corner.}

The main background image for this piece is a photograph I took after one of the worst days I had last year (driving home from Ottawa during a terrible ice storm, after a show that wasn’t great, with highway closures and dying cell phone battery). Later when I was looking through the ice storm images, I was not only struck by their beauty, but reminded of something my husband said a lot the first spring he spent in Canada. Being from Northern Ireland, my lovely husband was used to green everywhere 365 days of the year. He enjoyed the snow the first winter here, but come April was repeatedly amazed that somehow everything that had looked completely dead only a week before was suddenly sprouting and bright green - bursting with new life.

To convey some of that cheerful optimism, I layered in two different images of unlikely growth; these purple elements are flowers and succulents that were growing out of the rocky volcanic coast of Pico Island in the Azores. Tiny colourful jewels popping out of a cliff of black lava in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The bubbly light grey texture is tiny dewdrops caught in a spider web on our front porch; my maternal grandmother lived on a farm when I was a kid, and I can remember walking around the garden with her in the mornings sometimes. She always used to point out the dewy spiders’ webs, and told me that’s how you could see where the fairies had been dancing overnight. (How magical is THAT?!)

There’s a layer that’s almost invisible - the word GROW is woven through the trees as a reminder that winter never lasts forever. This layer is barely visible to the naked eye, because I didn’t really want the text to be what you noticed while viewing the piece. But I wanted whoever ended up owning it to know that this was the intent behind it, and to serve as a reminder for them whenever they needed it. To view a quick video showing this secret layer appearing (and then disappearing again), click here.

If you are interested in acquiring this piece for yourself, click here.