Mountain peaks, forests, glaciers and secluded lakes - the feelings evoked by these landscapes are placid and mysterious. Their magnitude and strange ecological communities exude a sense of otherness that plays on our dreams, and stokes our fears. Growing up in the Great White North, the vast and remote wilderness caught my imagination. At first, through the lenses of manicured cultural symbols, where nature was an idealized, separate and external entity. Now, working directly from the backcountry, I’m trying to reconcile my place, impact and purpose in the natural world; this immense, intertwined web of beings.
Of particular interest to me are sites oozing doom and ecstasy. I purposely mine the tension found in magnificent environment threatened by the usual layers of human blunders: unfettered energy extraction, introduced species, habitat fragmentation, etc. Since capturing the essence of the sublime is an ideal which artists have long pursued, and often failed to effectively translate into visual terms - how do you present the unpresentable? I now utilize the sites’ molecules as material of expression. Native fibres, pigments and dyes are harvested on location and placed in relation with invasive species or man-made objects. The energy of sites is then transformed into material vitality that lives on in the artwork as marks, colour and paper.
With the use of textures and shapes evoking contemporary experience with the outdoors, the work strives to apprehend the landscape rather than merely infer the sensible. By reconstructing the primacy of tangible locations, steeped with sublime qualities, the installation and/or images incite a closer look at the organic matter that surrounds us, its possibilities and a questioning of our attitude towards the complex system that sustains life.
Of particular interest to me are sites oozing doom and ecstasy. I purposely mine the tension found in magnificent environment threatened by the usual layers of human blunders: unfettered energy extraction, introduced species, habitat fragmentation, etc. Since capturing the essence of the sublime is an ideal which artists have long pursued, and often failed to effectively translate into visual terms - how do you present the unpresentable? I now utilize the sites’ molecules as material of expression. Native fibres, pigments and dyes are harvested on location and placed in relation with invasive species or man-made objects. The energy of sites is then transformed into material vitality that lives on in the artwork as marks, colour and paper.
With the use of textures and shapes evoking contemporary experience with the outdoors, the work strives to apprehend the landscape rather than merely infer the sensible. By reconstructing the primacy of tangible locations, steeped with sublime qualities, the installation and/or images incite a closer look at the organic matter that surrounds us, its possibilities and a questioning of our attitude towards the complex system that sustains life.