The stone that moves me:
my relationship with material

I am a mosaicist working mostly with stone. I am in a totally different head space when working with stone. I am calm, focussed and moved and inspired. But before I get to work with the stone I feel it, look at it, feel it, live with it…and did I mention, FEEL it? All this is part of the stone’s journey and my relationship with it.

In this exhibition I hope to give viewers a glimpse of how I feel when I am working with stone. I often work monochromatic and almost always in abstract. This gives the stone voice – sometimes loud, sometimes soft, but always strong. My work process is often to focus on one material from a particular place, and I use that stone exclusively to speak to the geological location and the emotional connection I feel with it. For the viewer my working monochromatic and abstract provides an opportunity to see the raw beauty of the stone without being distracted by pictures, colour and competing texture. And it is how I feel moved to work with the stone.

This body of work speaks to time and place, but also to the ancient-ness and unchanging-ness of stone. In an age when there is so much change environmentally, socially and politically…stones feels grounding (literally and figuratively).

For this exhibition I will be working with stone collected from different places across Canada – slate, granite, basalt, beach pebbles and even a variety of gravel.