Following the path of connections.

In the spring of 1988, as a first year student at Sheridan College’s School of Craft and Design, our class went on a field trip to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. The exhibition that a couple of our instructors had insisted we go to see was called A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965. It was a powerful and thought provoking exhibition, which included work by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, David Nash and Bill Woodrow.

While I was initially struck by Cragg and Long’s work, it was David Nash’s use of wood and the ideas I found within it, which has provided years of inspiration. His self conceived book, Wood Primer, provided an opportunity for a deeper appreciation of his approach to making that informed some of my earlier sculpture with wood and glass, such as ‘Rooted’ (from 1994, which was included in the Corning Museum’s New Glass Review #16 and is now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts).

In 2003 Nash had been invited to give a master class by the director of Northlands Glass School in Lybster, Scotland as she had heard he was interested in doing some work with glass. Having just attended the Glass Art Association of Canada conference in Toronto, at which I gave a lecture about my work, the director, a friend of another glass artist friend, thought I might be interested in attending the class – might be? How could she know? Though it was all a little last minute, I was able to apply for financial assistance through the Ontario Arts Council, and found myself in northeastern Scotland at the end of August with a group of artists from around the world, listening to the most inspiring lectures. The class was not so much about glasswork but about art and art making. David was interested in grafting his approach to wood on to glass and I had the opportunity to share some of my methods of hot casting glass without moulds into sand. But it was what he had to say about the approach to art making that he and his peers had pursued which inspired me the most.

In the summer of 2004 I conceived and created an installation of glass cups, entitled ‘ripple’. There are ninety-four days from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox, so I made enough cups to have one new one per day. Each day I drank everything (anywhere I went) from the one selected cup (except for day twenty-three, when the cup broke part way through the day – there are two cups for that day). I started by simply recording on the cup the number of times that it was filled, but ended up recording what it was filled with, as well as observations on the weather, activities, and ideas. The marking on the glass through the blowing process as well as the etching throws a shadow reminiscent of the ripples created by throwing a stone in water. Each day, another stone tossed into the water, rippling out and making connections. The resulting installation has taken a number of forms but was shown as part of two solo exhibitions, Drawing Water in Ottawa in 2004 and Common Water in Toronto in 2005, and was also shown as part of ‘Speak, Memory’ in 2009 at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. And while that exhibition in Moose Jaw lead to a couple of other solo exhibitions in Saskatchewan in 2011 and 12, I am still working with that same curator on a touring group exhibition called ‘Drawn from Wood’ scheduled to begin in Brandon, Manitoba in the spring of 2022.