Patrick
“I think any person using art to whatever degree helps them grow as a person. It's going to help them become more aware, stepping away from the life they lived. It helped me want to stop the cycle and stay living on the outside. The project helped me realize that there is more than one way to tell a story.”
Click each photo or scroll down to read Patrick’s story
This dress was just blowing in the wind. It just looked so free in one way but also terrifying in another, almost like somebody was jumping out the window. What would make somebody go down the path of suicide? I do a one-man play that is 75 minutes long. I wanted to have a continuous scroll with the names of all who had died in prison. Too many names, 75 minutes wasn’t enough time. It’s a lot of people, and a lot of those deaths were preventable.
These are all of my penitentiary files I got when I was starting to think about my life inside. I was trying to find out what brought me there. I thought the files would tell me why I went down that path and nobody else in my family did. In a way this is my selfie, but it isn't. It's a false photograph. The files say my name all over them, but I couldn't really find myself in them, you know? The stories that happened to me inside, all my memories, have nothing to do with these files.
I like collections. I like little things. I guess I got that from my mum, my mum always liked little trinkets. Some of these coffee makers don't work and some of them would probably work if you spent a little time on them. Like myself, they've been through a bit. A couple had a rough life. I relate to them. When I wonder why I went down the path I did, a lot of it was a search for being together. Maybe that’s why I like collections. The sense of community, to be needed, to be wanted, to be thought of as useful.
Every time I pass by the Rogers Refinery, it always reminds me of all the old penitentiaries, La Vieux Penn, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. They're just very dungeon-y. I always liked those places, because you knew where you stood. You were on one side, the guards were on the other and you didn't mix. In minimum security, guards try to be your friend and try to get you to open up. Everyone wore outside clothes so I couldn’t tell who was a guard or who was an inmate. It put me off balance.
The resilience of this tree, it’s been through so much but it’s still there. You can just see the age on it, like an old face. When you see somebody who has ruggedness to their cheeks or scars, you can tell they lived a life. How many wind storms has this tree been through and how close it came to being knocked down. They even put up a sign to not climb on it, it deserves respect.
This is life in the city, right? It was a rainy day and I saw the remnants of a crow. I like crows. I used to have a crow that would come to my apartment and I'd feed it every day. I don't know if this crow died naturally or if a cat or a coyote got it, but it's just the circle of life and it’s going back into the earth.
I wanted to encapsulate the worry, the stress, the anxiety that people have from COVID. This was just a lineup of chemicals that we used when we bought groceries, when we went out for a walk, on the bottom of our shoes, all those things that you have to do continuously and religiously. We used them multiple times a day when COVID first came out because nobody knew where it was coming from. Scary. Nobody knew what was going to happen.