From the country in the fall. I can't wait till the snow is gone and it looks like this again.

I forgot to mention in my last post that the wonderful Manon de Pauw is having the opening of her show tonight. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Manon in the past few months and as well as being a talented, surprising, and multidisciplinary artist, she is also a really nice person. So her show is at Galerie de l'UQAM (1400 Berri, here in Montreal), and the opening starts at 5:30 tonight. If like me you can't attend tonight she is also doing a performance Saturday night from 10pm to midnight to coincide with Nuit Blanche. I don't find that Manon's work comes across all that well on the internet, it's best if you can see it in person, but this exerp from one of her videos is a pretty good example.

Photos from Matt's parents' cottage, taken this past summer. Happy belated Birthday Matt!

This is my sister on Christmas day. I took it with a crappy point and shoot so it's not good for much but I really love it. It makes me think of a Klimt painting.

Some image from my neighbourhood in the fall.

So then I came back to Montreal, happy with the photos I had been able to make of potatoes in Ireland, figured that really this shouldn't be that hard, and that I was doing well with this new way of working. Well, beware over-confidence! Photographing potatoes in a Canadian winter, and making them look like they belong, is not easy. Above are some of the results. Really I wasn't happy with any of them. Perhaps the top one was my favourite. And at this point my random choice of subject started to wear on me. I knew that if this project were to be anything I'd have to justify the use of potatoes and I wasn't happy with any of the reasoning that I had come up with. And so the potatoes were banished and I am now working with other subjects in the Canadian landscape. It's still a work in progress and I'm not ready to show it yet but I imagine that some time in the spring or early summer I will be able to show you the results.

Soon after taking that first potato photograph I went to Ireland where I spent most of my time photographing my grandmother and visiting with relatives. When I had some free time I decided to try working with potatoes in the environment. And the above are the results from those first attempts. Kind of a cheesy concept: potatoes in Ireland, but the idea was just to try this way of working that was completely new to me.

This photo was the beginning of my mission to make the type of images that I talked about here. Taken in the fall, I was walking down a dirt road in the country when I saw these peculiar looking rocks. Upon closer examination I realized that what I had thought were rocks were in fact potatoes. Someone had thrown a handful of potatoes into the stream! The visual trickery and the need to take a second look fascinated me. Genius I thought, potatoes will be the first subject I use in my new intervention way of working!

The dregs of the Irish Grandmother bucket.

More Irish Grandmother. I really enjoy the middle image. I feel that I got that one just right.

Probably another week or so of Irish Grandmother and then we'll move on. It's nice for me to put them all out there, here on the blog. It makes me edit down a little and then whenever I open the blog I get to see them again, and a new understanding of what's working and what's not dawns on me. But now I'm at that point where I'm almost sick of this project and feel the need to move on. This year was the third year that I went to Ireland in December to photograph my grandmother and it's always around now (end of Jan, beginning of Feb) that I begin to feel that it's all been done and that I shouldn't go back next year. Then by the time September comes around I feel the need to go back again. Recently I heard David McMillan talk about his Chernobyl series. He said that the first time he went he thought that he only needed to go once, and yet he has gone back just about every year for the past 15 years. I'm not saying that this Irish Grandmother project is anything as epic as that. There are definitely some problems with this subject that has been done so many times before (as Muse-ings mentions here). As an aside David McMillan mentioned that one of the things that originally inspired him to go to Chernobyl was an article by Alan Weisman. Weisman has since written a great book called "The World Without Us". Definitely worth a read. One of the best books I read in 2008.

2 perspectives.

She uses the window light to read the headlines. The essential window light.

More Irish Grandmother.

My grandmother getting her fire ready as she does every day in the winter.

When I first saw her chop the little pieces of wood I kind of freaked out. Here is my 87 year old grandmother, kneeling down, in the cold, wielding as axe! I asked her to let me do it but she said something like "don't be silly, I do this every day. You go and take some pictures." And so I did.

More images of my grandmother in her daily life.

I've been walking through a lot of cold, ice and snow these days and it makes me realize how lucky my grandmother is not be exposed to a Canadian winter. Winter in Canada must seem very dangerous to the elderly. That and isolating since I imagine they don't go out that much in these conditions.

More images of my grandmother from my December trip. Many shades of pink.

More stills from my grandmother's house in Dublin, taken during my recent visit.

Some stills from my grandmother's.

Sorry for not posting recently. I went to the cottage on the 26th and just got back on Saturday. Lots of shoveling and snow-shoeing and skiing and skating, it was great. I hope you all had a very happy holidays and a happy new year!