Note by the artist

From 1991-93 I had the great good fortune to be part of the Art Institute at the then Capilano College in North Vancouver, working in the sculpture department with George Rammell. This was a formative time for me, exploring experimental foundry - which in my case included making wax casts of natural forms, and adding to wax human forms to make hybrids. Then casting in bronze and one memorable time in iron.

 

The resulting work was shown at Richmond Art Gallery’s new state-of-the-art installation space in the show Viridian Wings, alongside Nancy Brignall and Margaret Glavina.

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Artist's statement for the show Viridian Wings

I am interested in making work that has an element of archetype, in the Platonic sense of first form or prototype. By bringing together human and plant forms to create new images, the hope is to give expression to states of consciousness that are both transcendent and recognizable.

 

I find infinite inspiration in the ever-changing wild plant and tree forms around me.

I feel enabled by them to find visual metaphors for human experience - a language of images with which to speak of that mystery in which we live our daily lives.

 

My work is figurative - since, as human beings, when stripped of all our external

trappings, what do we have but our bodies? The figures are pared-down body forms, bare of ego, stripped of all but the essential.

 

The form of my old land has always held me; soft and rolling; raw and bleak;

horizontals of golden or brown grey light, broken by the thrusts of great iron towers, stones and crosses. Perhaps my human forms cannot help but echo those bare treeless bones.

 

Colour is an important part of the form to me; colour is light/life. Colour for these

bronzes comes as inspiration from my surroundings; the deep green blues of canyon pools, the purple greens of the woods behind my house in the rain, the grey green lichen spots on tree stumps. The elemental chemical colours of the patina when combined with the plant and human forms symbolize the unity of humanity and nature.

 

So maybe these forms have a heart of the great silence, the bones of old England, and a skin of the rainforest.