The photographs in Fragments were taken during three trips to Havana over a 12-month period. I edited approximately 6,000 images again and again and this show is a further distillation. Havana has captured my heart and with these photographs I hope to share this deep connection.
The photographs in this Grasses Series were taken in Uplands Park and Cattle Point this past year. The late autumn photographs show the fragile beauty of the grasses as well as their changing colour and form.
They are but a few of the hundreds I took over this period, sometimes returning with my camera two or three times in a singe day.
This became my meditation.
The soft and shadowy images in the series called Silence were taken in my studio.
Memory Shrines, Solo Exhibition
September & October, 2012
Congregation Emanu-El Synagogue, Victoria BC
Consider the words of Doreen Carvagal: “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes…”
These Memory Shrines, assembled with great caring and deep intuition, are an expression of the stories my cells have stored, over time and despite layers of new data and recent memories. They embrace my distant past, the stories and images of my ancestors, inherited memories of the Holocaust.
T.S. Eliot writes: “And the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started/ and know the place for the first time.”
My exploration continues, and, as in most deep quests, it is often a spiral, touching a painful subject with barbed wire and a soft whisper. Horrible things happened to innocent people. These small boxes take notice and remember. They are a manner of honouring.