Residency:
Terra Nova National Park
NL(May-June 2025)
Sponsor: The Rooms, St. John’s NL

Studio Production:
Ongoing

In Summer 2025 at a residency in Terra Nova National Park, NL, I made rubbings on cloth from large boulders and found materials on the Atlantic Ocean beach (see accompanying images). These works followed upon a project I had developed near Lake Huron, ON, over the previous 18 months. For that earlier work, I selected 26 stones and produced hand-engraved woodcut plates and then printed them (not shown here). Thinking of that grouping as an alphabet, while not marking the prints as such, I was aware of making work based upon a set of ‘natural’ objects invoking a human system of meaning-making.

During the time in Newfoundland, my carved plates and subsequent rock and object rubbings sparked a curiosity about fossils, and inevitably led to my exploring Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve in an area of Newfoundland called the 'Irish Loop.’ My visit there offered a rock record of extinct non-human seabed animals from 500M years ago; a document of disappeared creatures that allude to – yet ultimately elude – human-centric narratives. A sample fossil,(charniodiscus procerus),is depicted in the accompanying photos.

Numerous rubbings on cloth shown here are in-progress. They are being sewn and finished with assistance from Elaine Ball and Barbara Mahon.