Himel’s work is about human experience. And in that theme, she looks closer, to the elements of that experience, to worlds lived and imagined, the spiritual and the emotional, memory and promise. Her study of space is rooted in the understanding of landscape as both an encounter and an image. It’s in the balancing act of grounding and departure—always looking for the light through the tangle of life. It’s in decay, not as destruction, but as catalyst: a signpost for renewal, growth and reclamation. And it’s in honesty, about creating a portrait of landscape as it is: something apprehended and unknowable. Paint is the medium she uses to formalize the possibility of a place—a place alive, mutable and shared, a character in our collective unconscious.

Artist Statement

‘Trailing Perceptions’ is a collection of landscape paintings that are neither here nor there. They touch on reality and depart to dream and memory. Or they begin in that ethereal space and the reach to root in a real sense of place. Colour and texture play to human experience which is at once alive in real time as well as awakening other planes of consciousness. Just as the show title offers the option of viewing the meaning literally as the action of following an interpretation, perceptions can also be trailing behind, influencing and offering the choice of reinvention or adoption. Both leave the viewer in this space of finding their own connections in these gamesome explorations of the iconic Canadian landscape.