Weathering, 2019

The Weathering series was photographed at Downes Point on Hornby Island, British Columbia. The artist Anne Ngan, now in her 80s, dances on these pitted, limestone rocks every day. Ngan’s gestural movements and their erasure became part of my collage process, where the trace of the human figure merges with and is eclipsed by the weathered landscape.

I was researching the choreographer Helen Goodwin when I met Anne, and we talked about women being overlooked and erased from art histories. Anne was one of Helen Goodwin’s original dancers, as well as the partner of ceramicist Wayne Ngan, and a key member of the Hornby conceptual artist community that also included Doris and Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Payne and Tom Burrows.

A founding member of Intermedia in the 1960s, Goodwin developed an improvisational style of choreography bringing avant-garde artists Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin and John Cage to Vancouver. Yet Goodwin was forgotten by history, she died in 1985 by walking into the ocean in Vancouver having lost her 10-year-old son. The piece alludes to the challenges of being an artist and a mother. Was her legacy erased because she was a woman, and worked in performance? Or because her suicide and lack of archive seem to eclipse memory of her work? Where does the archive sit, in the body? Or the ephemera, photographs, and memories of her contemporaries? By creating this body of work with Anne Ngan, a dancer in her 80s, Weathering acknowledges that sometimes the archive sits in the bodies of those who were there…

EXHIBITIONS + SCREENINGS

CAPTURE PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL AUCTION Vancouver, Canada 2022

ARTS UMBRELLA SPLASH AUCTION Vancouver, Canada 2022

POLYGON ART AUCTION North Vancouver, Canada 2021

WAAP, Wil Aballe Art Projects Solo Exhibition Vancouver, Canada 2019