It was in her third year of art school at UBC Okanagan when Corie Waugh decided she was going to pursue art full time.
She had originally intended on continuing on to a Masters Degree in architecture.
“I just realized that a bunch of my peer group, they were a bunch of hacks, they all wanted to be teachers or something like that,” she said. “I didn’t really find myself in that group…At that point I thought, ‘I could make this work, somehow.’”
Though Waugh created a sculpture for the current exhibition at the art gallery, she usually dabbles in either oil painting or photography, though at the moment she is exploring pencil crayons as a medium because she doesn’t have a studio space at her current home on Quadra Island.
“It’s just a simple way of expressing yourself, sometimes it’s not as simple as I would like,” she said.
Waugh said she has always been attached to the act of making things. Her mom told her stories of the tantrums she would throw in preschool if mom tried to take her home without the paintings she had made that were still drying.
“I can communicate more thoroughly through visual communication, through different types of expression than language…especially when I was younger,” Waugh said.
However, that has changed since becoming an adult.
“That is what university did for me,” she said. “I just opened up and was able to talk more to people.”
After finishing her degree, Waugh moved to Victoria, but found she couldn’t settle down there so she tried Vancouver for a while, then, around three months ago, she moved to Quadra Island.
“I’m not one of those people that likes to settle down if I’m not completely happy,” she said.
Waugh was in Berlin for a month during the winter when the previous curator of the Art Gallery contacted her about participating in Hot Dog Car Wash (see article on page 40).
“I was seeing all of these monuments because it’s such a historical city and they really want to talk about their past,” she said.
With those for inspiration, Waugh tackled a memory she had from walking through Kelowna and recreated it with found objects from Quadra Island.
“This one, that I recreated basically was just a hubcap on a street post just stuck with me and the idea of monument, I just get stuck on these different, like I get stuck with words and then it spirals into something else and then I guess art finally appears from that…” she said. “It’s like a little bit obsessive compulsive, ‘Oh, I can’t get this image out of my head I have to create it in some way’.”
Waugh has participated in a few group shows. The most recent one was in Edmonton. Once she was accepted to the show the curators paired her up with another artist for a collaboration.
“They were coming from a music side and I was coming from a visual arts side and we met in the middle,” she said.
But working long distance was difficult and as well as creating a mixed media installation, Waugh said she learned a lot about communication as well.
She had also shown pen and pencil crayon drawings at the James Black Gallery in Vancouver. But she feels the opportunities for in that city are few and far between.
“I tend not to be able to show in Vancouver just because it’s a very specific group of people that are in the arts scene and I am just not willing to do my time there,” she said.
At the moment Waugh is working at the Heriot Bay Inn and enjoying the summer.
She is planning a move to Montreal in the fall.
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