Artist Statement
I remember, as a child in British Columbia, spending many long wonderful summers with my grandmother in the small Kootenay town of Nakusp located on an expansive portion of the Columbia River known as the Upper Arrow Lake. In the late 1950's and early 1960's there still remained large pockets of virgin interior rain forest. These ancient trees were hundreds of feet tall and measured 6 to 10 feet in diameter at their base. The woodland caribou were abundant. Large stately cottonwood trees ringed the Arrow Lakes which rose and fell with the natural rhythm of the seasons. This was my playground and my classroom. My natural sense of curiosity was my teacher. My childhood experiences have had a lasting effect in focusing my attention on both the minutia and landscape of Nature. Here the plants and animals are like old friends because of my familiarity with them. The forest was my neighbourhood.
This childhood recollection of unexploited Nature has long since been destroyed both figuratively and conceptually by the unrelenting need and greed for resources to meet the economic growth paradigms of the ever-expanding human species. This process translates into the art world through the exultation of non-nature based abstract imagery and the downgrading of Nature-based work. I use my photography to inform on the beauty of Nature and to help people reconnect to their ultimate roots. It is the alienation of the human species from Nature that has enabled vast arrays of destruction of the diversity of ecosystems that few people knew but were vital to our very existence. Through man-caused climate change the Earth will survive. It will adjust over the 20 million years or so (ie the historical Permian Extinction) required to restabilize the climate to once again enable the goldilocks habitation zones which we are currently at the point of losing at the cost of the human species and the myriad of other species required to sustain life as we currently know it.
