In a series of performance and anonymous projects, I played with the notion of the fairy as a liminal being whose presence – in literature, in the imagination - was ambiguous but not entirely frivolous. Fairies have been longstanding characters in the Western imaginary, especially in terms of thinking about the elements (water, fire, earth and wind), and explaining otherwise inexplicable phenomena. In the guise of a “fairy”, I made miniature paintings and offered them as gifts to strangers in Mexico, while in Montreal I created hundreds of pairs of glow-in-the-dark “fairy wings” for participants to wear in the annual Take Back the Night march. My fairy alter ego took broken flower blossoms after a fierce storm in England, and sewed them back together, and to the bushes from which they came. The fairy was for me a way into thinking about an order of being that was different from, yet hinged to the human, and especially became a way for me to explore the symbolism of wings attached to human form. During these projects, I also concentrated on the kinds of exchanges that could arise from the offering of a gift; this became a fundamental part of my art-making strategies at this time.