Still spoken, gritty, scary, sweet and sublime

Beats of the late Blake Parker, poet and performer

Published in ARTiculate Magazine, Spring/Summer 2006

photo: Fred Rosenburg

It’s the hypnogenetic cadence and rhythm of his words. The words sweep from human collapse and crumble to the sublime nature, the one which comes along for the holy, jolly, terrifying ride but isn’t defeated by it.

Implements and Objects: Lou Lynn’s Visual Fantasias on Useful Things

Published ARTiculate MagazineSpring/Summer 2007

Walking through Winlaw-based artist, Lou Lynn’s bronze and glass sculpture exhibition, Implements and Objects, at the Kootenay Art Gallery in Castlegar, recalls a child-like fascination with useful things. Some of it comes from the sheer size of Lynn’s visual fantasias, which dwarf the spectator. Some of it is admiration for the way she marries together disparate elements, textures and colour, the durability and warmth of bronze with the fragility and icy pallor of glass. Some of it is sheer wonderment at the feat of engineering it took, for example, to fix an hourglass-shaped glass handle into a narrow bronze double-ferrule.