There’s something about the coastline in Newfoundland that speaks in a language older than metaphor. It doesn’t announce itself. It just so of hums in the background until you realize you’ve been listening to it the whole time.
In Newfoundland, the rocks don’t just sit still. They feel alive in that slow, heavy way that only things shaped by time and weather can feel. They’ve been battered, softened, etched, and scabbed over by centuries of wind and salt and silence. And in the places where you’d expect only emptiness, where the surface offers nothing but hardness or indifference, something strange begins to glow. Sunburst lichen, bright and defiant, burns its orange circles into the grey.
I saw it first on a utility pole—just a smudge of colour, like a careless brushstroke. Then later on a rock near the shoreline. Then again. And again. It kept showing up, as if it was trying to get my attention. Not loudly. Not in a way that asked for anything. But steadily. Like it had always been there and was simply waiting for me to notice.
And when I did, I couldn’t stop seeing it… everywhere.
There was something queer about it, and I don’t mean that only in the biological sense, although that’s part of it too. It’s a composite organism, neither one thing nor the other, living in symbiosis, resisting clear classification. But what struck me most was the way it insists on growing in places no one invited it to. It clings to surfaces others would call useless. It finds its way onto stone and cement, onto things meant to be ignored. And instead of retreating, it blooms. Vivid. Unapologetic. Refusing to be dull. It makes a kind of beauty out of being overlooked.
So I started to crochet what I was seeing… not as a replica, but as a response. A kind of material meditation. I didn’t plan the shapes. I let them form themselves the way the lichen does, spreading in clusters, not quite symmetrical, growing in whichever direction felt right in the moment. I added pins at the centres. I thought of spores. I thought of cells. I thought of constellations or structure and meaning. This isn’t a scientific rendering. It is a gesture toward relationship. It is stitching and handcraft as attention and meditation. It is colour as presence.
There’s something about making things slowly that invites thoughts to arrive in their own time. And while I stitched, I kept thinking about how queerness isn’t just an identity or a political position or a flag and parade. It’s a way of noticing the world. It’s a way of surviving in inhospitable conditions, of adapting without erasing yourself, of showing up differently and still belonging. Or maybe belonging more fully because of that difference
Queerness, like lichen, doesn’t need or ask for permission to be there. It doesn’t explain itself to ourselves or to anyone else. It takes what it needs and makes something luminous out of it which is so much like experience of being a queer person. It lives in the cracks and the places no one else is already taking up. It refuses the tidy and finished edges like the artist in me. It finds beauty in what others might call ruin or waste.
The more I sat with that, the more I felt like the lichen was saying something I hadn’t been able to say myself. Not in words, exactly. But in form. In colour. In how it refuses to fade into the background, even though that’s where it begins. Like the lichen, I couldn’t fit in even if I wanted to and when I finally realized this about myself, I figured I was better of not trying to try fit in anywhere, but to pick a spot that I wanted and to grow there. I am thriving in the periphery and in the waysides as my bright and colourful self. I am living my life brightly and boldly at the edge of the frame… on the frame, outside the box and into the wilds. I have found a fabulous root system of queer artists and allies. This is the places where I feel most like myself.
I keep coming back to this one thought from my visit to Newfoundland and my time with the starburt lichen. It’s not a loud declaration, but a quiet rumination from this brightly coloured truthteller. It is not a demand, but it is a solid enough statement I can hold and has become the title of this new artwork… “I contain more than you expected.”
This artwork and more is on view at the John Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove, New Foundland until the End of July, 2025.