Between 1992 and 1996 I created several extensive series of multi-media objects, which I called “painted constructions.” These projects varied in size, from hand-held paintings to built objects of a size that an adult human could begin to enter. These objects frequently engaged architectural language, without having the scale of the built environment. I wished to invoke familiar architectural and representational topoi, such as the tower, the window, the archway and the door, in conjunction with landscape imagery. Encouraged by my education at McMaster University, under the guidance of professors such as Graham Todd and Judy Major-Girardin, I wished to explore a personal iconography of form and content, and to bridge what I felt to be a gap between the representational flatness of painting and the way that sculpture and architecture engaged the human body. Inspired by artists such as Joyce Wieland and Tony Urquhart, I wanted to make small worlds infused with meaning but also criticality. In my collection of symbols and forms, I hoped to develop a feminist visual language, perhaps ultimately personal, that could speak to, and subversively inhabit male-dominated, creative traditions such as painting and architecture.