Few Are The Giants
STATEMENT
“Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.” — Freya Stark
On the surface, this is a series about Rogers Pass, about the mountains and the highway, the built and natural environments that funnel people through and over and around. It is also about questioning all the things, real and imagined, that give the impression of separateness.
Throughout this process of making photographs, digitally altering them, then seeing them again transformed while transferring them to wood or canvas, I’m thinking about all the ways we are connected to one another and to the lands that we travel through.
In the tedium of the transfer process, peeling back layers of paper fibre to reveal the image underneath, I find hours of meditative space, time to think about wholeness, the role of the individual within the collective, and the ways that we each experience the world around us in uniquely familiar ways.
It is through the individual experience of present moment awareness that we each bring color to life, adding a layer of brightness to the landscapes we see and to the interactions we have with one another. This is what renders invisible threads of connection visible, what makes the fabric of our shared experience apparent and real, proof of our collective wholeness.
Though ‘few’ are the giants according to the Stark quote that inspired the title of this series, I believe each of us has the innate (though sometimes inert) ability to see all of humanity as our family circle. We each can be such giants of the soul.
Available works from this series can be found at Unravel Therapeutics in Golden, BC and Project A in Canmore, AB. The original exhibition was in Gallery Three at the Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre, April 28 to May 22, 2022.