Deirdre McGahern - I can measure the
stages of my life by what I've been building. As a toddler, I'm told I was happy for hours plunked down on the dirt with a
spoon just digging. When I was ten, 3 girl friends and I designed, bottled drived and built a tree fort complete with roof
and screened-in windows. Our big goal was to sleep in it when it was done but we never did. I guess the fun was in its making.
My alone time as a kid was spent making all kinds of things and that really hasn't changed. Today I spend most of my time
building but that's just another form of making and when I'm not, I make things on a smaller hand held scale--sewing projects,
books and one of a kind oddities and gifts.
I grew up in Ottawa and attended Canterbury
High School for the Arts, where 2 hours of my day was spent drawing, painting, sculpting, printmaking or doing photography.
It was a pivotal time and lead me to Mount Allison University in Sackville New Brunswick where I spent another 4 years making
art before graduating in 2000 with a Fine Arts degree. Somewhere along the way, all the talk of acid rain, global warming,
reduce, reusing and recycling of the 1990s really got me and I became an activist and gravitated towards all things green.
Projects took on a new form as I worked with others, often into the night, making tree costumes, banners and even retrofitted
a school bus to run on vegetable oil to support various campaigns. There I bought the book The
New Natural House by David Pearson and learned of straw bale construction. I was profoundly struck and slowly but surely
began steering my life towards this new/old way of building.
First stop was Algonquin College in Perth Ontario where I completed the Construction Carpentry Program
in 2004. There I learned to build with wood and how to make things stand-up! Making was taking on a whole new scale and use.
Immediately following, I moved up the road to Madoc Ontario for the job I'd been hoping for: an internship with Chris Magwood,
an endearing and pioneering straw bale builder, author and educator from whom I’d taken a workshop from a few years
before. For six months we worked closely with a team of others while building his mother a house. Towards the end, I headed-up
one of Chris' projects: building the Sustainable Washroom Block at the H.R. Frink Center in Plainfield, Ontario. That was
the beginning of Straworks - a start that lead to my first solo project in 2005 to design, project manage and build a Canteen
Washroom Facility at Madoc's new state of the art skateboarding park.
Six years in, I can see that I build in more ways than one. In the physical sense I build
super insulated and environmentally sensitive buildings. This takes building and maintaining relationships with clients and
fellow crew members who are sometimes one in the same. I've learned this is as important as proper cross bracing--without
it things get shaky on the job site and can fall apart. Together we learn from each and build community. I build as a way
of life and a way to create a place, however small, where I want to live. Hope to see you there.
And if you want a straw bale tree fort, let me know.
