Neighbour of Note: Steve deBruyn Steve deBruyn is a Wortley Village local of 23 years who straddles dual careers as both a visual artist and a landscaper. “I was really into skateboarding as a teenager and one of my favourite parts of that was building ramps and other obstacles,” Steve explains. “That got me into wood, building, design and DIY sensibilities and really shaped the approach I take today to making pretty much everything. Gardening/landscaping is an influence on my artwork for a lot of the same reasons; my concurrent career is as a landscaper and I try to engage a crossover between that practice and my art as much as possible, whether that be physically or just in spirit. My garden is my happy place in the summer and a lot of art ideas come from just messing around out there building raised beds and trellises and stuff like that out of scrap wood. My backyard is a two decades-long work in progress; a lot of experiments happen back there with mixed degrees of success and I wouldn’t have it any other way!”
themselves and also the processes that can be applied to them. I’m pretty pragmatic as an artist and any given project will usually start as a “could I possibly make this work?…” kind of almost as a challenge to myself. This inevitably introduces elements of trial and error and failure, necessitating pivots, problem-solving and a wrangling of materials to get to an outcome that might or might not be quite exactly what I set out to do. This is the fun of it for me though so I’m always looking at materials and objects for challenges, influence, and ideas on what I can do next.” “I’ve been all over Canada through my art (I have two territories and two provinces still to check off my list) over the last two decades and I’ve been starting to show outside of Canada over the past few years,” says Steve about his career highlights. “I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to places I might not have ordinarily gone so I’ve been to some pretty obscure corners of the country. Have you ever heard of Rouyn-Noranda? Neither had I until I was invited to a residency and spent a winter month there and it was great! Stuff like that is always fun; I got invited to Bulgaria and I’ll be spending four weeks there this summer working on an exhibit there. I don’t really know what to expect
Steve says both his grandparents were art hobbyists, citing them as an inspiration for his practice: “My grandfather was a bit of a folk artist; he would try any medium and had a good knack for creative problem-solving. I doubt he would recognize a lot of the work I make today as art, especially the larger installation work I do, but he had that DIY methodology. My grandmother was massively into fibre arts: sewing, knitting, macrame, crochet, cross stitch, you name it, and she had taught me a few things when I was pretty young and I was around it a lot but I hadn’t really delved into fibre arts until the beginning of this year when I took sewing lessons with a local teacher. So I feel that connection now when I’m at the sewing machine and it’s nice, I hope to reach her skill level some day!” Steve has dabbled in many mediums but always comes back to wood. “I enjoy the tools and the process and I think you can make just about anything out of wood. Since I’ve been exploring fibre arts and sewing, I’ve found a lot of similarities; the way you can use found materials, the processes of measuring, cutting, and recombining, the texture and the flexibility to move between more 2D and 3D-based work or anywhere in between. A big part of my process is using found/repurposed materials both for environmental and economical reasons but also because I like when my material has a history to it; that it has been used, perhaps even loved, and that history can inform the work I make. My work could be made out of an old fence or an old hoodie (or a combination of the two) and maybe that isn’t always totally apparent to the viewer but I know it’s there and that gives it a bit of depth, a story to tell. I’m very much influenced by the materials
Page 6 Wortley Villager • June 2025
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