Perhaps in me someone very old still hears the living sound of wood*

A landscape, a record – carved out, reverberating through time and timber. In the 19th century the old growth white pine trees of the Ottawa valley were logged extensively and shuttled downriver for export. Driven by the British Navy’s demand for lumber, the wholesale extraction and shipment of ancient trees across the Atlantic Ocean was as a tangible manifestation of a colonial ideology that laid the foundation for Canada as a nation. I think of those trees often. What did it feel like to bob down river and roll across the sea? What did they look like – what did this land look like with them in it? What a loss this is. In this exhibition I use photography, video, sound and installation to create space in which to meditate on the trees that were once here and the persistent mark their extraction has left on the current landscape. *Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pg. 15.