Slag

Abstract

The need and longing to connect to another is a fundamental desire of the human heart, enforcing a sense of movement toward social and personal security and, moreover, the future. Yet it is paradoxical that, where people are the most closely crowded together, feelings of alienation and loneliness are often the greatest. We live in times of busy isolation, on streets where we don’t know our neighbours, in societies where our lives are lived behind closed doors. As the global village grows, our personal worlds shrink, both by circumstance and by choice. Our innate, gregarious nature faces its greatest challenge, or ultimate defeat.

The story of my hometown, New Waterford, is a substantial element in the story of my life as well as my art. The woodcuts and many of the paintings in the exhibition, Slag, are documentations of this place, its inhabitants and their way of life. It is a town with a unique character resulting from the circumstances surrounding its relationship to coalmining—a town that is withering away now that the mines are gone. Other paintings in the exhibition depict people and spaces from other places that I have lived. Though the environments change, there are similarities in the pathos of the human subjects that remain constant. In my work, whether I am depicting the inhabitants of a hollowed out town or the solitary subway commuter, they are united as those things that have been lost or left behind in the name of progress—the leftovers and waste: the slag.