This body of work emerged from several overlapping areas of interest: in narrative as a kind of mapping; in the possibilities of language as physical form; and in paper as the substance rather than the traditional substrate of a work of art.
The pieces in Verso are based on excerpts from the writing of three English women who described their encounters with the southern Ontario landscape in the 1830s. Anna Jamieson, Susanna Moodie, and Catharine Parr Traill, all educated middle class women, recorded their impressions with a public readership in mind, primarily an English audience. Their observations reveal a shared ambivalence toward the landscape they encountered. Transcribed in high shrinkage flax pulp, each text becomes an object with dimension, language with shadow.
“No two seasons have been at all alike and it is supposed it will be still more variable as the work of clearing the forest goes on from year to year.” ~ Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada, 1836