A tall, handsome woman in her late seventies stands high atop a stone formation, clothed in her best homemade blue skirt suit. Behind her, endless plains unfold. With her hands folded in front, she sings "Home on the Range" in a high church voice.
"Sugar loaf, little bank, second bank, the whales back, the deep whales back, the ladders." These are the seamarks that Norm, a cod fisherman, once saw and once used to locate himself when he was still going out to sea.
Six-Sevenths of an Iceberg is about story-telling, landscape and the intimate relationship we can establish with place. Video chapters relating the human world with animal, connecting landmarks with seamarks, create a shifting, layered connection between these two unique regions - southern Alberta and Newfoundland.
As an artist interested in landscape, it is difficult to work without feeling some sense of anxiety. As the landscape becomes altered and increasingly difficult to understand, so is our relationship to it. Our perceptions of self and thus, our identities are inextricably linked to our ideals of place.