window ice

i was in grade six when a part of me was radically adjusted - revibrated even - it was a simple experience and probably one that wouldn’t affect other people to the same degree or in the same manner. i was in a school gym - a relatively large gym at gateway boulevard public school in north york. i don’t recall the event but it involved darkness and so may have been a grade six “dance”. i surround the word “dance” with quotation marks for the simple reason that in my own experience, no one actually dances at a grade six dance . . . . it was in the middle of the “dance” that a teacher appeared with an overhead projector, a large glass bowl, and several packs of jello mix. the teacher carefully swirled the water in the bowl and then placed the bowl on the screen of the overhead projector. he then added - very gently and very slowly - teaspoons of jello already in a semi chilled solution into the bowl - the resultant swirls and minglings were enlarged several hundred times on a large screen. the effect was psychedelic and stunning and unmatched by anything i had seen before outside of the silvery grey swirls i had seen a few years prior to that in a tin of metal paint that i had applied to my father’s armstrong-siddeley’s running board.

today’s pictures are all taken through a blur of ice frozen now for three days to the front window of my house. i have drawn the blinds back so that the kids and i can enjoy the swirls and ripples and collisions of colour and form that take place as distorted by the ice.



if you think that you are merely looking at blurred shapeless forms please don’t be alarmed.



you are.



i can’t explain why these images appeal to me - and i’ll be really honest with you - these are the ones i like!! the rest got unceremoniously clicked into the pixel-packed dustbin. i love blurry photos sometimes. they seem to contain something that is more elusive even than the perfectly framed crisp clever images i aspire after.