Archive

Mount House Gallery window installations 2020

“ONE TOUCH OF NATURE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN.” ~Shakespeare
March 2020

“IF THERE IS MAGIC ON THIS PLANET, IT IS CONTAINED IN WATER.” ~LOREN EISELY
April 2020

“TREES ARE THE POEMS THE EARTH WRITES UPON THE SKY.” ~KAHLIL GIBRAN

Easter weekend. Photographs taken of spring flowers and skies.
Over two-hundred butterflies cut from printed vellum originally planned for an installation in the college chapel,
but cancellation meant I was able to use them here.

April – May 2020

The final window installation stayed up for several weeks.
May-June 2020

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In March 2020, the UK locked down, and the Mount House Gallery closed the group exhibition early. The five series of window sets are the result of a spontaneous idea stemming from disappointment at seeing an empty gallery space and the desire to brighten the town in some way. Each window pane was the size of an A3 sized paper so for the first installation I chose and printed forty photographs of macro views of flowers. I didn’t think I would be doing more than one but what resulted in four more installations were a joy for me to create.

Exploring Totem 2013

Exploring Totem Series, 2013
Ranger Station Art Gallery
Harrison Hot Springs, Canada

This series began in the summer of 2012 and has grown into a body of hundreds of digitally manipulated photographs. During my artist residency in New York that particular summer, I began to add various man-made elements to my paintings/drawings, turning them upside down and on their sides to add to and distort the narrative aspect of my abstract, nature influenced work. I moved to Harrison Hot Springs for the year long tenure as Artist in Residence at the former outpost Ranger Station in September of that year and began instinctively taking hundreds of photographs to document my new surroundings. While exploring the area and formatting the photographs taken, I started to see the parallel between what I was doing in my paintings and what was possible with photography. I began rotating, flipping and mirroring the photographs as a way to take the immediately recognizable landscape, shift perspective and potentially build iconic monuments stemming from but not held in reality.
By referring to them as Exploring Totems I mean to give respect to the First Nations people who reverently build Totem poles to commemorate their ancestry, history, land, kinship and allegory of clans. The word Totem itself, although tied originally to the Ojibwe people (doo-dem) as far back as the late 1700s, is most often associated with the west coast tradition of building and displaying these poles. It is both physically and ideologically what I am referencing -the reverence and connectivity to nature. These are, in a sense, my own way to express a deep love of my surroundings coupled with a concern for its welfare.

The photographs used have been taken in the Fraser Valley region (Chehalis, Seabird, Cheam and Papkum First Nations) of British Columbia with new pieces being added from Vancouver Island and the Southern Gulf Islands.

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A selection of over thirty ‘Exploring Totem’ are available as postcards, or commission prints to size.
See SHOP page.