MFA thesis, Concordia University, 2010

Created over five years, this series revolves around myths of wilderness while weaving a visual narrative between the psychological and physical presence of northern landscape. Wilderness and Other Utopias, explores remote wilderness and sacred landscapes including protected sites within Haida Gwaii, a secret swimming hole within Banff National Park and a snow-covered forest in northern Quebec. Images of over‐grown cedar longhouses, ancient totems and constructed hideouts have been selected to illustrate my ongoing fascination with wilderness and a desire to create proof of its existence. But equally, these photographs hover between reality and fiction, representing imagined landscapes and invented states of being. Presented together, as large-scale photographs, these images operate somewhere outside of the borders of the pictured territories creating only glimpses of a remote paradise. Documenting some of the most isolated landscapes in Canada, this work challenges the definitions surrounding wildness and its placement within modernity. It questions colonial definitions of northern landscape and explores distant territories as places for solace and safe haven.

While shooting in Haida Gwaii, I was invited to visit ancient sites of Haida villages, to photograph the remains of eight hundred-year-old longhouses and to walk amongst huge totems within some of the world’s oldest forest sites. The difficulty of reaching these regions became representative of a modern‐day pilgrimage, presenting these landscapes as shrines from a distant time. Equally, these trips provided me with an awareness of the importance of isolation, the existence of communities that continue to support remote ways of life, and the many difficulties surrounding the protection and preservation of these irreplaceable sites.

Within these images is the desire to explore new territories, to not only encounter their existence but to create narratives surrounding a sense of the unknown and a belief in their future survival. Many of the images I have produced in the past revolve around notions of shelter and a continuing aspiration to locate sanctuary outside of the everyday. Images of secret hideouts, swimming holes, and remote cabins continue to fuel my desire to create a body of work representing a fictionalized state of wilderness that exists within a collective subconscious. Suggesting the experience of isolation or a sense of detachment from the every day, this project hopes to evoke questions surrounding our relationships to wilderness and a desire to experience these landscapes, even from afar. Within my practice, I am continually investigating issues surrounding the shifting regulations of land use, the return of land to First Nations communities and the many ongoing conflicts to protect wild lands from extractive industries.