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I have been thinking about traces.

About what remains in a place after we leave it, and what we carry away with us.

Every year I spend a weekend camping on a wooded point extending into a bay on the Northumberland Strait. I have been returning for roughly 15 years; the gathering itself has been happening since the early 1980s. It is a place I have come to know through repetition, not simply as landscape, but as a landscape layered with people, sound, memory and time.

For a few days each year, the point is intensely occupied. Tents rise among the trees. Paths appear through repeated footsteps. The grass is pressed flat beneath bodies and belongings. The fire burns for hours and leaves ash behind. We swim in the bay. We watch seals and herons. Instruments migrate from one part of the site to another as small groups of musicians form and dissolve throughout the day.

At night, we gather around the fire and sing.

And then we leave.

The tents disappear. The grass eventually rises. Rain enters the fire pit. Footprints vanish. The physical evidence of our presence is temporary.

But I am increasingly interested in the traces that are less easily erased.

A place can become a repository for experiences that leave no obvious physical mark: conversations, relationships, music, grief, laughter, belonging. A particular patch of ground can hold decades of these associations while appearing, to someone encountering it for the first time, simply to be grass, trees, stones and water.

This idea,of landscape as something accumulated rather than merely observed, is becoming increasingly important to the way I think about my work.

We often speak about memory as though it belongs entirely to the person remembering. I am not sure that it does.

I wonder how much memory becomes attached to place through repetition. Whether returning to the same landscape allows previous experiences to remain somehow concurrent with the present one. Whether we encounter not only the place that exists now, but every version of it we have known.

This year, that question feels particularly present.

Since our last gathering, three people from this community have passed away.

Their absence changes the landscape.

There are places where I expect a particular person to be. Sounds I associate with them. Instruments, gestures, conversations, ways of occupying space. Their bodies are absent, but they have not disappeared from the experience of being there.

In some ways, their absence has made their traces more visible.

One of those traces came home with me months ago, before I understood what it would become.

A friend who was fundamental to my own development as a musician gave me his octave mandolin. At the time, it was simply an extraordinarily generous gift. We had been talking about instruments, strings and sound, and he handed me his and told me to keep it.

Now he is gone.

The object has not changed, but its meaning has.

His hands held it. His decisions shaped its sound. He chose its strings. He played it. Then, deliberately, he placed it into my hands.

This year, another of his instruments was placed into my care, but in a very different way.

During the weekend, his wife asked me if I would create a sculpture from his first guitar.

I am still trying to understand the weight of being entrusted with that.

The guitar will become a permanent work on the point, in the landscape where we have gathered and made music together for so many years. Unlike the flattened grass or the ashes from the fire, this will be a trace deliberately made to remain.

And that makes the responsibility of creating it feel enormous.

This is not simply an object from which I have been asked to make something. It is an object that has already lived a life. It has been held against a body. Hands have moved across its wood and strings. It has produced sound in rooms and around fires, alongside other instruments and other voices. It carries associations that belong not only to me, but to his family, to his friends, to the people who played beside him, and to a community whose memories of him overlap without ever being exactly the same.

There is something sacred in being asked to work with an object carrying that density of memory.

I don’t yet know what the sculpture will become.

And I don’t think I should know yet.

It may take a long time to understand how to intervene without erasing; how to transform the guitar while allowing what it already carries to remain present. I need to understand what should be changed, what should be protected, what should be allowed to weather, and what new sounds, or silences, it might hold.

Perhaps the work begins before I make anything at all.

Perhaps it begins with listening.

When I play the octave mandolin now, I am conscious of this transfer—not only of an object, but of knowledge, influence and memory.

Perhaps this is one of the things I am trying to understand through my practice: what does it mean for something to remain?

A trace is not necessarily static.

Ash disperses. Grass rises. Footprints disappear. Stories change in their retelling. Songs move from one voice into another. An instrument passes from one pair of hands to the next.

The trace continues, but it transforms.

And perhaps we do as well.

The people gathered on this point come from radically different lives and experiences, yet for a few days those distinctions seem remarkably unimportant. Music, conversation, shared history and the physical experience of occupying this landscape together create something that persists beyond the weekend itself. Some of us barely see one another during the intervening year. When we return, the connection is immediate.

There is almost no sense of beginning again.

Instead, it feels like continuation.

That distinction interests me.

I have often thought about landscape in terms of what has happened upon it—what has been built, removed, disturbed, buried, grown over or forgotten. But there are also landscapes created through recurrence. Places changed not through dramatic physical intervention but through the accumulation of human presence.

We arrive.

We occupy.

We leave traces.

We leave.

We return.

And every time we return, we bring back what we carried away.

This year I am thinking particularly about those who cannot return with us.

They are present differently now: in stories, in habits learned from them, in the ways they changed other people, in music, in memory, in an octave mandolin that will sound again beside the water. (When I am ready to hold it again.)

The landscape holds some of this.

We hold the rest.

And somewhere between those two things, between what a place retains and what we carry forward, I think there is work I need to make.

August 2026

I recently spent an afternoon at the Sackville Waterfowl Park with Lucas Morneau and a small group of artists for one of Struts Gallery’s ad hoc workshops, exploring the capabilities of the Blackmagic PYXIS 12K cinema camera.
Having worked in video production before, the technical side wasn’t entirely new territory. What fascinated me was seeing what a camera like this is capable of, and beginning to imagine how those possibilities might find their way into my own artistic practice.
Much of my work has been rooted in still photography, where a single frame invites reflection. Lately, though, I’ve found myself drawn to the idea of expanding that experience through moving images and sound. I’m interested in the subtle things that photographs can only hint at: wind moving through reeds, changing light across a landscape, the rhythm of water, the atmosphere of a place unfolding over time.
I’m not looking to leave photography behind. Rather, I’m curious about how still images, film, and sound can work together to create a richer sense of place and connection.
The afternoon was a reminder that learning isn’t only about mastering new technology. Sometimes it’s about seeing familiar landscapes and familiar tools in a new way, and recognizing the creative possibilities they open up.
June 2026