With his mother, my great grandfather arrived on a stagecoach in 1883 near the southern shore of Lake Superior to join his father, who’d been there for how long before no one alive remembers.
I return often to my ancestral home and have pursued special moments of object and light around three of the Great Lakes. I’ve come to know remote places few recall and fewer still ever visit. In the richness of this region is found robust contour and line, sublime shadow and light, conflict, serenity, a resurgent natural wildness and myriad sign of a remarkably diverse cultural impact, fast fading.
Wilderness obscures the track of many peoples long past and here their mark is being reclaimed by what some once thought to tame. That struggle is of particular interest to me, whether those people were our Ojibwa cousins who dyed rock with symbols, fur trappers that traded pelts for coin, miners who risked all to fuel an industrial revolution, or immigrant farmers that hacked their way through the woods chasing a dangerous dream to carve a better life for their sons and daughters from a hard, unyielding land.
Our place in the natural world is rarely secure and we cannot make it more so through resistance. The Great Spirit of the wilderness will outlast our construct and its song of inevitability holds valuable lessons, we have but to listen. My art is an effort to reflect this Spirit as a captured moment in time. To reveal us in its shadow and perhaps provide a window -- however slight -- through which each might discover their own personal glimpse of the mystery that inhabits and fuels us all.
Wilderness obscures the track of many peoples long past and here their mark is being reclaimed by what some once thought to tame. That struggle is of particular interest to me, whether those people were our Ojibwa cousins who dyed rock with symbols, fur trappers that traded pelts for coin, miners who risked all to fuel an industrial revolution, or immigrant farmers that hacked their way through the woods chasing a dangerous dream to carve a better life for their sons and daughters from a hard, unyielding land.
Our place in the natural world is rarely secure and we cannot make it more so through resistance. The Great Spirit of the wilderness will outlast our construct and its song of inevitability holds valuable lessons, we have but to listen. My art is an effort to reflect this Spirit as a captured moment in time. To reveal us in its shadow and perhaps provide a window -- however slight -- through which each might discover their own personal glimpse of the mystery that inhabits and fuels us all.
Photographer, essayist and fine art printer for nearly thirty years, the time has come for me to heed the whispers of cultural memory, listen fully to the soft song of the living forest and follow them both into the unknown.
The Great Spirit of the Wilderness has lessons for us all, if we care to hear.
Green Chaos
