Elza Mayhew’s Coast Spirit has been with me since I started working at the University of Victoria in 1983.  Situated in front of the McPherson Library, this monumental bronze column…

Installation in progress.

A curator working on research for a craft exhibition drew my attention to an image he had uncovered on the internet. It depicted a large sisal textile piece I had…

Curly willow or tortured willow, corkscrew willow, Salix matsudana ‘Tortusa’Dianthus caryophyllus, carnation Equisetum, (; horsetail, snake grass, puzzlegrass) Laurus nobilis of the family Lauraceae, laurel Aucuba japonica Aucuba japonica Japanese…

Scanning through the Ikebana section of the university library I came upon this book: Rikka: The Soul of Japanese Flower Arrangement by Fugiwara Yuchiku The book speaks of the origins…

I consider  Morandi in his bedroom, painting images of bottles in Bologna while fascists take hold of Italy and think about about the relevance and significance of my ‘practice’. Adopting…

I came upon this in Laurie Anderson’s essay Time and Beauty. IS SOME ART MORE BUDDHIST THAN OTHER ART? A lot of the art I happen to like seems to…

Over the past week I encountered two works that caught my attention. One was during a critique session at UVic when Nic Vandergugten presented a video installation of Tree Climb the other was over a coffee with Trudi Lynn Smith as we talked about her ongoing project Trouble With Trematodes.

At present my studio is a building behind my house.

Despite our strategies to bridge the visual gap between the photograph and the thing being photographed, that distance stubbornly remains…

“We face the imperative to understand anew today what it might mean for photography to ‘move beyond representation’.” (Hito Steyerl from ‘Documentary Uncertainty’)

They haunted me for years before I could finally place them… small, darkly coloured, murky photographs of the night sky.

During the 25 minutes that the camera exposed its film to a 16″ X 20″ section of the studio wall , I would sit, open my eyes and meditate on that section of the wall for the same length of time…

“you don’t have any ideas, you start making work without an idea, I always have an idea before I begin making a piece”

“…contrary to the opinion of previous scholarship, the second half of Rosso’s career was dedicated to the achievement of his artistic goals through the creative medium of photography.” Francesco Bacci

I was reading W.G. Sebald’s, The Rings of Saturn, and came across a passage where he speaks of two Persian friars who had brought the first eggs of the silkworm from China.

Part of my attraction to the work is that it could not survive, and now only exists in relatively few murky black and white photographs that I peer into in an attempt to reconstruct it in my mind.

Saturday October 17. Reciprocity: The large camera and the studio wall, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

Saturday October 24. The Long Exposure: Duration, meditation and the un-archivable, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

Sunday, November 1. The Artist Studio: Disappearances and reappearances, is one of three ‘open studio’ events that Trudi Lynn Smith and I staged in order to invite dialogue around a project that we had been working on involving photography and the studio space at 562 Fisgard Street.

It was an amazing process involving a strange gelatinous concoction of silver nitrate and other chemicals heated in a crock pot in the darkroom to be later cooled and then squeezed through a kitchen ‘ricer’ and then reheated. The liquid was then carefully poured onto the surface of a very clean pieces of glass put into the back of the 4″ X5 camera and exposed.