My next exhibition – opening September 3 at View Point Gallery in Bedford – is a kind of diptych. One set of images, in black and white, depicts the landcapes of an eroding shoreline. The other set, in colour, shows some of the vibrant plant life that manages to survive and flourish at the tumultuous intersection of land and sea.
The series is inspired by the pleasure of spending time along this shore and discovering its rough beauty. The photos also respond to my own anxiety over the climate crisis. This landscape is a daily reminder of the prospect of rising sea levels. The disappearing shoreline becomes a stand-in for larger questions of what is being lost, and what will survive in the years to come.
A diptych is a way to view one subject from two different vantage points. This show attempts to look at the world in two distinct time scales: the vast cycles of geological time contrasted with the flickering instances in which plants emerge and bloom. The show features images of loss. But it also presents images of adaptation and renewal.
You can see a preview of a few images from show in this portfolio.
“May the cradle of the ocean
spawn our likeness in years to come”Christopher Dewdney, “United” (in Alter Sublime)
I take photographs as a way of deepening my own relationship to the place where I live.
The photos in this exhibition were all taken in Little Liscomb on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. The Mi’kmaw name for these waters is Me’katewik, which is often translated as “where the big eels are found.” The name speaks to the specificity of the Mi’kmaw relationship to the area and the importance that it has played in Mi’kmaw life.
I want to acknowledge that this is the unceded land of Mi’kmaw people. That I am a beneficiary of the Treaty relationship and the long history of Mi’kmaw stewardship of these beautiful lands. And that the global crisis that we’re living through – and will pass on to our own descendants – reflects the way that we, as a society, have failed to honour the spirit of that Treaty relationship.
