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How did Traces come about? Marja-Leena Rathje I applied to have a show in Finland, which is where my family came from, in mid-1998. The curator asked me to find a couple more Canadian artists whose work related to mine. Steven Dixon was substituting for Wayne Eastcott at that time, and I saw a connection between his work and Bonnie's and mine. Because of the length of the application process our work has moved on, and I think the connection is even stronger now. Traces is about the time factor, and marks or tracks, and things left behind. It's about looking to the past, but trying to find a connection to the present as well. It just dawned on me that while much of the work is about humankind's marks and history and impact on the environment, none of the work actually has a human figure in it. And yet the presence of the human is very strong in all of it. That's maybe the biggest connection of all. Bonnie Jordan The use of icons or symbols to suggest a human presence helps put people in a state where they are willing to go back, maybe centuries back, and look at things from that perspective. People seem very willing to do that if they are looking at a symbol instead of an image of a person. There is one living creature in one of your works, Bonnie. It's the image of the sheep standing behind a gate which you photographed on your first trip to Ireland, where your father's family came from. What does that do? Jordan It's like a stepping stone or a portal, a symbol of knowledge that I felt was there. Trying to get to it at that time was almost as difficult as trying to talk to the animal. It's a symbol of information that was there for me to find if I went for it. There's so much at that place, which was the site of an old castle. I felt that just below the grass were all sorts of artifacts that I could discover, and from them piece together what went on there. Rathje That's like an experience I had when I went to Italy. The most moving thing for me was to come across ruins, especially unexpectedly. An old Etruscan village was being excavated, and Rathje's Nexus III when you walked around this place you could just feel the energy or the aura or whatever you want to call it. That made much more of an impact on me and my work than anything else I saw. It's that sense of really ancient history, of realizing that people actually lived there -- maybe even my ancestors. Jordan Ancient sites still have a presence when they have not been turned over to tourism There's a presence about such places when they've been virtually untouched and not used as a tourist attraction. It still is what it was. Many people say that just from being there they feel a sense of what the place was and who was there. I think that's the kind of communication all three of us are talking about and trying to make visual. Rathje I used the hoodoos, those sandstone pillars from Alberta. To me, they too have a certain kind of an air about them. But they're not made by man, they're made by nature. This series I call Nexus, because that means "connection." I'm trying to play off these connections between nature's works and man's. It would be lovely to take a hoodoo and place it next to Stonehenge, or somewhere like that, and compare the two. May | June 9