Come join us for a night of poetry and expression!

With the goal of bridging the gap between the art and the artist, Fiona uses her writing as a way to show the outside world exactly what she is thinking about.

From Fiona:
I Keep Looking Different is a collection of 10 poems written in the past 6 months. As the title may suggest, my work focuses on highlighting and embracing the fluidity in our experiences of ourselves, as well as the world around us. Put simply-the theme is that there is no theme. The importance of these poems lies in their lack of structure & uniformity. I use my writing as a direct way to process and document how I perceive the world around me, and I always find myself shocked by how different that can look. My goal in my writing, and artwork as a whole, is to bridge the gap between art and artist. I use my writing as a way to show the outside world exactly what I am thinking about, leading the viewer to gain a better understanding of themes presented in my visual artwork. As I previously mentioned, this collection of works directly focuses on my personal experiences. This causes topics of sexuality, gender, and mental illness to become prevalent themes- since those are a direct reflection of important aspects of my current life as a 19 year old queer woman, and artist.

Fiona McMillan

Hello! My name is Fiona McMillan, and I am an artist and writer from Whitby, Ontario. I work in many different mediums, but hold a certain love for pen and ink drawing, oil painting, and poetry. I am in my second year here at Queen’s, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I have always had a deep love for creative expression, however, over the past 6 months I have felt myself fall ever deeper into my relationship with my work.

As a young artist, I am constantly working to figure out what I want my work to communicate, and my writing has become an essential part of finding that voice. I like to describe my writing as the ‘deep cuts’ of my artwork- they are nothing but sheer vulnerability. I love to hide behind the room for interpretation that visual artwork offers, and have spent most of my life making work that merely ‘referenced’ what I was feeling, without exactly spelling it out. I think I was hiding behind my work for a long time- and the thing that equally excites and terrifies me about my writing is that there is nothing to hide behind. I have begun to embrace this honestly in the past 6 months and have very recently started sharing my writing with the world. This has created a beautiful symbiotic relationship between my artwork and my writing, each element forces honesty, and therefore pushes me to be better. I am extremely proud of this journey, and I honestly just really want to share my work with others. After hiding this work in notebooks for years, I feel it is time for it to be celebrated, and I thought no better place than here.

My writing is the most honest thing about myself, and I am deeply excited to be sharing it with you all tonight.