The Centrepointe Neighbourhood Magazine featured my photo on their cover (Lindsay Maahs) and an interview article by Sophie Desrosiers about my Arctic Circle Expedition June 2019, and follow-up presentations titled Sailing the Top of the World hosted by Britannia Yacht Club. I plan to publish the presentation as a book sometime in 2020.
Already in 2020 I’ve been working hard on a body of work inspired by my Arctic Circle Expedition. A few sketches below use nautical navigation charts of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway, bodies of freshwater which are impacted by climate warming.
Exhibitions in January and February included a couple of group exhibitions at Carleton U. 5th Community Exhibition Ottawa, and the DRAWING 2020 at John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto.
Already in January I’ve completed a series of 10 small watercolour and graphite sketches titled Wrapped Boats on The Hard, 5 of which are on nautical navigation maps of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes. As research toward an installation, I combine my wrapped boat portrait-like sketches with loose watercolour sketches of melting arctic glaciers super imposed over the numerical navigation charts of water depths. This combination references the collapse of global geographies and changing coastal cultural bearings, challenging the navigation of climate change uncertainty. I intend the corporal-like shapes and folds of the wrapped boats to reinforce this idea that hints at a subsurface presence from another time and to also echo the shapes of the glacier mountains. And to visually reinforce the shapes of the mountain glaciers sketched. These works are inspiration for an installation in progress. While these are popular, I intend them as sketches toward development of an installation proposal.
