Places.

Places have shaped me as much as people. The landscapes I’ve wandered, the cities I’ve lived in, the rooms I’ve sat alone in, they all leave their fingerprints on my work. For me, a place is never just background. It is atmosphere, memory, presence. It carries weight. It holds silence. It becomes a character in its own right.

Growing up on the Saskatchewan prairies, I learned to see beauty in stillness, in emptiness, in the vast stretch of horizon. The prairies taught me patience, but also dislocation. In all that openness, I often felt small, unmoored, swallowed by space. Those landscapes appear in my work as both comfort and confrontation: wide skies that soothe and isolate, flat plains that promise freedom but also remind me how misplaced I am within them.

In a world that often feels foreign and unwelcoming, I turn to solitude, not as an escape, but as a way to feel less alone. My black and white medium format landscapes are quiet moments captured during my solo travels, scenes of stillness and space, where the weight of expectation begins to lift. Through isolation, I find clarity. Through the lens, a kind of belonging.

Lately, this practice has become less about the external image and more about the internal shift it allows. I am learning to strengthen my inner self, to listen more carefully to what I need from myself rather than what the world expects of me. Out on the road, camera in hand, the pressures of performance and conformity fall away. What remains is the dialogue between myself and the land, unadorned, and honest.

Nature offers me a kind of comforting voyeurism. To look at a horizon, to watch light stretch across the land, to witness weather moving in, it is a gaze that asks nothing in return. It does not demand, it does not intrude. It allows me to be present as an observer, quietly absorbing, without expectation. Society, by contrast, has manufactured a voyeurism that is forced upon us. Every surface, every empty wall, every rural road is claimed by advertising, branding pressed against our eyes whether we invite it or not. We are no longer allowed to simply exist within our environments; we are made into consumers of them.

That divide, the natural world’s quiet invitation versus the man-made world’s relentless imposition is what my landscape work has helped me to see more clearly. Out there, in the silence of the prairies or the solitude of an empty road, I find a comfort I didn’t know I had lost. A way of looking that is gentle, that belongs to me, that doesn’t demand I buy into anything. The land, in its stillness, gives me permission to just be.

And perhaps that is why these landscapes matter so much to me. They remind me that belonging is not always about possession. Sometimes it is about reverence, about showing up with humility, about knowing when to disappear. The photograph remains, but I do not. What endures is the land itself, vast and unyielding, a presence greater than me, and yet, somehow the one place where I feel I belong.

Limited edition prints available upon request.