Since my daughter was born in 2009, my schedule for making art has completely changed. All of my work is now made early in the morning or late at night after she’s gone to sleep. This collection of drawings, which makes up half of my current art practice, are created at 7am, without planning, plotting, or sketching, before I get ready for work, before my family is awake.

The focus of the 7 a.m. drawing project is the routine. Each morning I wake up, sit at the dining room table, and draw. My paper and pencils are waiting for me, already in place from the night before. In this way, the act of getting up and making a drawing is similar to a daily meditation, and I look at employing the same elements of meditation – a clear mind, focus, and repetition. The drawings are populated by a cast of characters including: cavemen, flower eaters, and lost dogs. In these drawings, I also find my family and those characters from my past emerge among the fictional scenes. This work is a departure from the other half of my art practice where I make a conscious decision to not include my family or past directly in the work, opting instead to use abstraction and pattern as a way to address identity, hybridity, and gender. And yet in these drawings, created much faster than my other work, which is slow and meditative, there is no conscious censor. There is only repetition, focus and the space between awake and asleep.