For about 4 years in India, the photographic camera took me from the inner world of meditation outside into fields, villages and mountains. Photography became a means to look at and admire the world in a simple and direct way. When I left India, I began to study photography in a formal way, both in New York and later in Chicago, and my work became more self-reflective. I began to include my own body in the work to speak of the relationship between the self and the world, between the inner and the outer.

I have chosen for this exhibition a few works from that period. Most of the work shown has been made since becoming a member of the art institute here at Capilano College.

I have used the word ‘threads’ for one of the names for this show to indicate the idea that there are common threads, or themes linking together these pieces, which span a period of about twenty years. But the threads that link and hold together, that hold my attention fully engaged in my creative work, sometimes break.  These threads that link become the fence that separates, what has been flowing easily is interrupted, what has been whole breaks – and I am disappointed. But there is an other side to such breaks, fissures, cracks, ‘mistakes’, which is perhaps expressed when we speak of breakthrough and which Leonard Cohen has so beautifully put in this line:” there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light shines in”. A crack is also an opening.

Recently I attended a sweatlodge, where volcanic rocks, heated in a fire, are used in the lodge. One of these rocks, redhot, had a crack halfway through, and it was through that crack that the red glowed with the greatest intensity. In a way the material disappeared and only the light remained, and one was able to look deep inside. Just like the intense glow of this rock soon dimmed, moments of creative intensity, of deep connectedness, of glimpses deep inside the fabric of something, rarely last very long and the sense of loss, the breaking of this connection, this fissure, I think can be seen in some of the figures that appear in my work.