Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg

Ever since I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the way the decisions I make determine the paths that I’ll take on my journey through life. Decisions we make at any given time determine the shape of the rest of our lives. Each road leads to other roads and those roads lead to still others and so on: an infinite number of options. Some roads might intersect, or even lead to the same destination; but there are some from which

there is no turning back.

I set foot on the most crucial of my roads of no return when I was eleven years old: I had decided to paint a picture of the Titanic colliding with the iceberg. I don’t really know why I decided to paint a picture, or why

this subject came to me, but three years later, I was still painting. I had become deeply interested in art and

art history. I spent hours painting and looking at reproductions of paintings by major artists, many of whom are still my main source of inspiration. Then came another road, another option. Photography was offered as an option at school. I signed up for the class thinking of it as nothing more than a way of documenting things I might want to paint. When I developed my first photo, when I saw the image coming clear, everything changed. I felt something I’d never felt before: intense, absorbing, wholly personal. The word ‘vision’ took on a whole new meaning. I knew for sure that photography would be the great passion of my life.

I often think back to the moment when I decide to paint the iceberg, and the path that that decision took me down. I have no doubt that the journey I’m on now is linked to this one definitive moment in my life. The body

of work that constitutes “Melt” could never have come into being any other way. During my research into the Titanic disaster, I discovered that the iceberg had almost certainly traveled down Iceberg Alley an area off the West coast of Greenland where icebergs break away from the ice-wall and travel from Baffin Bay to the East Coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and then enter the shipping lanes.