July 13, 2021
(previously posted on June 18, 2021)
Water is made of molecules; two hydrogen to one Oxygen. These molecules arrange themselves in a polarity of positive and negative, forming into and out of loose hexagons that are always in motion. Surface wind and internal currents form this hexagonal dance into waves that pound onto shorelines. Great, rhythmic crashes and pulls like breathing.
Releasing contaminants too – other molecules dissolved from solids or from liquids with different components. Or not dissolved, like garbage. These arrange themselves among the hydrogens and oxygen, and make the hexagonal dance awkward, unnatural.
I watched the heaving shore waves all last summer as they spit up logs, boat cushions, plastic bottles. After a big rain, trying to spit out what looked like miles of surface soap bubbles that left slime on the shore rocks.
Lighter liquids like oils (and plastics, which are products of the oil industry) stretch on top of a body of water like a skin covering, like a mask that makes breathing difficult and distorts the cycle of rain. Gaseous H2O that rises from the lake surface in hot air then liquifies in cooler faster air above the heat, then falls, following its nature.
Sometimes the rain comes down straight and steady, a long, clean, washing soak. If it’s been especially hot for days and weeks beforehand, the gods of heat and cool battle in the sky, roar thunder and crash lightning that rocks the earth. In the forest just before a big rain there’s a profound stillness – in acres of trees not one leaf in motion, birds and critters silent. After the rain comes you can hear the trees and soil drinking in long, deep draughts, the colour in their bark and leaves deepening. The smell of the soil is deep, rich joy.
The water falls, hour after hour. This is a rain that saturates and overflows, washes over and through and around any obstacle, flowing always down to join again with the body that’s large enough to contain it. Stream to river to pond to Lake, to Ocean.
It’s raining like that now. The trees were in prayer in the wee hours, since thunder woke me at six am. After many days of bright baking sunlight, we all needed this.
I realized last night that, after eleven years of writing on this site, it’s about to change. If all goes as planned, the soft launch of my new website will occur later today.
Note, in the re-post:
this did happen, in fact, but the site was not appropriate and this post was lost, my passwords were overwritten and I was prevented from fixing anything for three days. Be aware of web developers and their contracts; make sure you’re working with someone you trust. I lost two months of work and $4500.
This rotten experience led me to a web developer who is also an artist, and whose studio is in the Cotton Factory down the hall from mine. The site you’re reading this on is the result of his magic and insight into what I need and how I work. Bless you, Laine.
Through the years here I’ve built a whole library of images, each marking a point in a story, from cordwood house building, through separation and eventually the first fire lit in my beloved off-grid cabin woodstove. Through Symphony, string and cello ensemble and quartet, private and group teaching, many studio sessions, gigs and wassails to an injured bow arm that changed everything in 2018.
A Masters in Community Music study from 2016 to 2019 that both changed and confirmed everything I knew about playing music with humans, about ecosystem and how ‘I’ am a part of, and in service to ‘Us’.
Last Bell, 2016 sold 
I’ve lived in four places through these years, each space remarkable in its difference from the last, each a new gift package of challenges and insights. Each a watershed of old belief systems, a clearing and reconfiguration of my molecules. In 2018 I moved from my little 12’x10′ off-grid forest cabin, to Hamilton, where I was born in 1963, where I came as a child to visit my dad’s parents, and where my beloved Cotton Factory studio is.
This new website feels like a new house to me. I’m finding new rooms to work in every time I upload material, and my library of photo stories is still here to dip in to when needed. It moves as I do, grows as I do. I’m overjoyed.
empowering conversations with Henry Miller
This brand new site is where my third Hamilton show will be recorded and published. The first show & talk was end of Feb 2019 as a final presentation for my three-month residency, the second was a group show with Womens Art Association of Hamilton that spring.
The NEW show is all about what got me through Lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
Conversation Pieces 25 July 2021 Apartment Pop-up Exhibition will be hung in my Hamilton apartment, where the pieces were made, and published online here so my pals and anyone from anywhere in the world who has internet can see it, and engage.
Check out the Exhibitions Page for sign ups and early links to video & audio. It’s been fun, and it feels good to have momentum – a positive and only slightly ridiculous way to emerge from global pandemic lockdowns.
That’s part of the conversation.
This new site is a GALLERY, where you can learn about, view and purchase my work. I’m so proud of this.
From these beginnings, and thanks to my great web developer master analog printer (Laine Groeneweg from Smokestack, thank you, thank you), great things will grow. I want to build the gallery so I can publish curated group shows, collaborations and community projects, and link to other incredible work.
All material for the CP works on paper are now uploaded into the Available Works page; prices will be published a week before the Exhibition opens (July18).
Remember that there are only 16 originals in this show, each of them beautifully framed in walnut with planet-friendly Hannemule hemp paper. If you’re drawn to one or two and would like to hang it/ them on your own wall, send me a note at any time and we’ll chat about it.