Artist Statement by Claire Dibble
“Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.”
— Freya Stark
On the surface, this is a series about Rogers Pass, about the mountains and the highway, the built and natural environments that funnel people through and over and around. It is also about questioning all the things, real and imagined, that give the impression of separateness.
Throughout this process of making photographs, digitally altering them, then seeing them again transformed while transferring them to wood or canvas, I’m thinking about all the ways we are connected to one another and to the lands that we travel through.
In the tedium of the transfer process, peeling back layers of paper fibre to reveal the image underneath, I find hours of meditative space, time to think about wholeness, the role of the individual within the collective, and the ways that we each experience the world around us in uniquely familiar ways.
It is through the individual experience of present moment awareness that we each bring colour to life, adding a layer of brightness to the landscapes we see and to the interactions we have with one another. This is what renders invisible threads of connection visible, what makes the fabric of our shared experience apparent and real, proof of our collective wholeness.
Though ‘few’ are the giants according to the Stark quote that inspired the title of this series, I believe each of us has the innate (though sometimes inert) ability to see all of humanity as our family circle. We each can be such giants of the soul.
Artist Bio
Claire Dibble is a photographer, writer, and project-based artist. She is currently looking at the ways in which people interact with nature, the privilege inherent in remote interactions in wild places, and the impacts of such. She carries a mix of self-taught and classroom-based photo skills (from Hampshire College, The Banff Centre, and the Rocky Mountain School of Photography). She is based in Golden, BC and travels frequently for residencies and projects. One of her largest projects to date involved building a kayak and paddling it the full length of the Columbia River, a 3.5 month photographic journey in 2019.
