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Copyright @ 2002
Vancouver, BC Canada
Since the late 60's I have executed works in photography, glass, bronze, paper, canvas, mixed media and wood. I have exhibited in Canada, the USA, and internationally.
I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, where my earliest influences were the applied arts, architecture, interiors, and public art. These enthusiasms fused in formal training in display and set design. I arrived in Montreal, Canada in 1965 to the influences of Francois Dallegret, and Armand Vaillancourt. I became a freelance Exhibition and Display Artist, working the World's Fair, Montreal, Expo'67. Since then I have lived and worked at the interface between fine art and the applied arts.
After living and working for 20 years in Victoria's Chinatown, in 1991 I moved to Port Alberni, a small mill town and natural inlet harbor in the middle of Vancouver Island. I was drawn both to the natural beauty of the setting and to the scale of the studio/workspace I could afford there. Together they held the promise of uninterrupted intimacy with my art.
The building I found was 20,000 square feet on three floors, built in 1928 of first-growth Douglas Fir. The building was in a state of neglect and decay, while the material it was built from had retained its beauty and integrity. I found inspiration in the wood, and its readiness, I felt its fibre as it were. I dismantled parts of the building and began using the wood to produce furniture.
Over time, local landscapes suggested to me, as did the sagging geometries in the building. I was challenged to preserve the dignity of the wood, and started to explore my sense of the material, and landscape and geometric intracies in their fractal dimension. I began to assemble pieces of wood into abstract compositions, discovering through the manipulation of very basic geometry, a resonance of the familiar
