This is a photo taken by a friend of mine in 1998. That spring I was granted a great wall on which to hang my freshest translations in an art/craft gallery in the village. Prime real estate. I was, as you see me here, taking photos of the work to be hung on the wall I mention. The sun was shining. Indeed, the sun is always shining, whether we percieve it to be doing so or not. What then is added to the scheme of things when we percieve this sun, shining, regardless of the weather? Perhaps this is the garden path to solipsism … or I may be on to something at the root of synchronicity. I’m going to archive some of what is caught and collected when the camera does the talking. Quantum camera lens open, see the light, close, repeat …

title : box of fear on the doorstep
media : oil pastel, excised magazine bits & pieces, black & white photo, thread, wood support
dimensions : approx. 11″ x 11″

This piece was in the pile in the previous photograph. This image of it was made at that time. It has since been laid in an unremembered spot. I don’t recall selling it but I may have.

Image, image, image assembly. When you go abroad with your quantum camera at the ready, be aware of the box of fear on the doorstep. There it sits. Know that you will fail to see it at all when you are ready not to. In the meantime it is helpful to know that everything will go in and out of it whenever you open it and preoccupy yourself with the contents. This is natural. Neither resist the box of fear nor lose yourself in it and all convergent harmonics become audible.

title : self portrait in clay
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

This image became the front cover of a self-published book of poetry entitled Miss Ellaneous – Image, image, image.

An image is worth all that may be seen by every observation of it combined, multiplied by the perspective of its maker.

Who says I can’t do math? Not me …

Quantum camera lens open, see the light, close, repeat …

title : emergency exercise
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

This moment was seized aboard ship, just off the coast of Florida in November of the year 2000. It has also been painted but we are squeezing the camera lens today; let us peer through that eye for now.

Quantum camera lens open, see the light, close, repeat …

title : lavish life
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

This image was one in a flood distributed by television. I sat on the back of a chair for many hours, over the course of many days, opening and closing three lenses in the fall of 2001.

Television signals are onions if you care to peel them.

title : onion studies in the window, #1
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

Light and clear glass and everything on either side of it may produce pearl onions of unexpected revelatory power, packing a subtle but noticeable afterbite experienced by those with tastebuds tuned for spiced looking. Coloured glass is a whole other kettle of fish entirely. Onion within onion.

title : as a matter of fact – pigs do have wings
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

I made these charming creatures appear before you and not without a great deal of willingness inherent to the universe as it is created by G-d.

The chain of quantum events expressed here includes (but is not limited to) my hands, flour paste, shredded newspaper and a digital camera :

Ta-DaAaAaAa …

title : Q: what doesn’t he see when he looks?
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

This image was a set-up. We are born with the option of rearranging the furniture around us. All the world’s a stage, it has been written. We are not directors in the fullest sense but we do have very dynamic roles to play. Take up your lines and cast them out. Go fishing. Let them who have ears to hear, hear. Let them who have eyes to see, see. Are you sleeping? Wake up …

title : Q: where is the goalie?
media : digital photography
dimensions : pixels x pixels

The game of hockey is a tremendously rich onion of veiled meanings. This may be equally true of any athletic endeavour but I have a special affection for hockey as this photo may attest. Last winter I accepted the great privilige of filling the empty net on the ice and it was an eye-opening experience. No doubt you are as sorry as I that there are no photographs of this, nevertheless, I can do a quick sketch of how it felt:

I am the defender of an empty net. I am a comic-book super-heroe on skates. Smoking hockey pucks may approach at bone-cracking speeds toward the vunerable region between my eyes and be gently reflected, harmless.

This kid is drawn to all this that lives in the goalie’s heart, like a moth is drawn to a flame, if he wants to know the whole truth. The goalie of sufficient scope will come right out of his crease and his net, properly defended, becomes an even smaller target. The essence of the game is this – the puck comes to the goalie, not the other way around.

This kid may or may not have learned the most expansive approach to take; he is not interested in defeating so much as he is hoping to exchange something with the goalie he knows will come to defend the empty net.

Where is the goalie? The goalie is eating an onion and offering up her prayers of thanksgiving.

Oh – and for all you hockey fans out there – here are my official stat’s:

9 practices
3 of which were full-on shinny
1 loss
1 tie
1 win

… lots and lots of glove-saves, baby.

Quantum camera lens open, see the light, close, repeat …

title : dreamtime
medium : wheel-turned porcelain, cone10, stains & clear glaze
dimensions : approximately 13″ high

Time to let another cat out of the bag … made of clay. This hearkens back to an earlier artistic incarnation, the era of New Bedlam Works. After graduation from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in May of 1995 I set up shop in a very wee village in the south-western region of the province. This pot was one among the next to last batch, 1999. I had approached the break-even watermark, fiscally speaking, so perversely, a batch or two later, I threw in the towel, made like a phoenix from the ashes and became a painter for awhile.

It made less sense at the time, albeit some sense to me at least, and now it makes all the sense in the world. I was painting all over the pots I’d laboured so painfully to learn to throw. What I mean is that ceramics was my major in university but I was more a sculptor than a potter and did not apply myself too studiously to the tradition of strictly potting. Neither did I pay much attention to my required study of chemistry and the science of firing. NSCAD provided ceramics students with a meaty opportunity to learn the atomic/molecular magic at work in the kiln but I was often elsewhere with my head in the clouds or the student union office. I should have failed Intro II but rather charmed my instructor into letting me pass on under the wire. I paid for it post-graduation, I can tell you…

There I was by grace/luck/grand desigh with a brand new kiln in a big room, a wheel with so much mojo it could levitate and many pounds of the sweetest cream-cheesey porcelain ever refined by man and I could hardly spin a decent pot to save my life. But I had to try because I’d swindled the government out of a start-up grant on the false premise that I knew what the heck I was doing and was prepared to make a commercial-cottage-potter go of it.

When my first batch emerged from the much dissipated heat of over 2000 degrees celsius it looked like it had contracted a hideous skin disease and I had no idea why or how, having used recipes that were working just fine at the college in Halifax less than a year earlier.

Over the next three years I did my best to make up for lost opportunities to properly study my chosen craft in school and cracked open the textbooks to unravel ancient mysteries. We have been making with clay for a very long time and even today most of the people in the world who make this magic do it the old way. I determined to crack the code with my shiny western easy-bake-oven method and eventually I saw progress.

The first thing that went out the window was the lie that I would be a production potter. One of a kind became my only song.

By the time this pot was born I was getting in the swing of it and enjoying more success than failure. Potting is for people who don’t think gambling in a casino is risky enough. You will break a lot of eggs before a truly edible omelet ever survives the fire. If you want to learn the meaning of perserverance – give it a try.

Since that long ago pot fell into my hands, after three years of nothing but paint on paper, I returned to my passion for form and began again. No wheel this time – just 150 pounds of stoneware, a fork, a plank of wood, two hands and a heartbeat.

I pinched and slabbed tea-pots, jars, spoons, bottles, bowls and cups for two years piling up so many green pots I lost count. I didn’t even have a kiln during that time – just faith that one would turn up and I’d find somewhere to plug it in. So it did.

They were all fired last summer/fall. I still have so much to show you …

I will end this introduction to the fired side of my nature with one more mentionable about this piece. It no longer exists. It fell quite unceremoniously and by tragic accident, smashed into wee bits. If you want to learn to give up the habit of attachment – ceramics is a good road to take …

“…and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know G-d : for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith G-d : for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. ”

– Jeremiah 31:34 (11)

title : the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
medium : stoneware tile
dimensions : 3″ x 3″ x 3/8″

title : high ground
medium : stoneware tile
dimensions : 3″ x3″ x 3/8″

What can I tell ye? What would you hear? Are you all ears or all conclusions, drawn and quartered? Are you sleeping? Wake up. It’s time to find high ground.

title : earth mandala
medium : gold spraypaint on excised image
dimensions : 7″ x 11″

title : sky mandala
medium : gold spraypaint on excised image
dimensions : 11″ x 7″

The mandalas are not my work … my wild hippy uncle made them along with a number of others which he sent through the post to me a couple of years ago, appended with cryptic notes … I got the distinct impression that my uncle Bob (Bob’s my uncle) also receives messages that he couldn’t quite decipher and I felt less lonely about my own predicament as a receiver/transmitter. No one chooses to speak in tongues.

They are words put in your mouth by G-d.

Perhaps you are altogether too rational to believe in signs and wonders beyond your ken. There will be a cure for this terrible affliction too – when all is said and done.

The weather is changing rapidly while inside Plato’s Cave all is carefully climate controlled to disguise the fact. The audience is assured that there is no certain link between their comfortable seats, soft chains, Pepsi-irrigated-minds and massive flooding, superstorms, drought, melting ice-caps, starving polar bears and elephant culls. “Remain seated.” is the order of the day, yellow alert.

Kami Kaze is Japanese translating as Divine Wind. Sleepers sleeping : all awaken.

AMEN

“Be still, and know that I am G-d.”

– Psalms 46:10 (11)