Avril Kirby 2018

Bio: Avril Kirby

Avril was born in Kamloops, BC in 1951 and lived all over Canada, mostly on air force bases, as a child. She attended UVic and Vancouver City College, taking nothing to do with fine arts or photography, and worked as a pre-school supervisor for 27 years. Her husband was a good photographer and she left most of their family snapping to him. When he developed Alzheimers she gave him a digital camera but as he became too ill to use it, she tried it herself and quickly developed a love for photography. Her family has always been active in the arts, though mostly painting and drawing, and this seemed to be an area where she could spread her own wings.

Avril has been seriously interested in photography now for the past 14 years, changing from primarily taking landscapes and straight photos and producing cards and the Salt Spring calendar, to using photography as artistic expression. She is more or less self-taught, with a few good lessons picked up along the way from mentors and fellow photographers.

She is drawn to photography as an artistic medium because, for her, it combines an instant of recognition with a certain amount of decision-making and imaginative thinking afterwards. The more she works on a photograph the more it feels as though it’s her own and the more it feels like art. For the past few years she has become enthralled with the fascinating process of layering photographs and creating fresh fantasies out of different realities.

For this year’s Photosynthesis exhibit, Avril will be presenting four works, one stand-alone piece entitled “Range of Motion” and three pieces which are part of a series entitled “Inherit the Earth”. In these last three she has used two of her own images and one of her great, great, great grandfather’s sketches of London’s Hampstead Heath in the 1800s.