These rugs show are a testament to the value of home and how we never let go of the indelible mark it has left upon us. They are about community but they are also about isolation. As much as they are about love, they are also about loss.

One Sunday morning as I was looking at pictures of Newfoundland I had a sudden, strong urge to revisit the theme of home that I had first explored twenty years ago when I began as an artist. It came upon me like a wave. 

I had not expected that the pressure to revisit would come upon so unexpectedly with such force of inspiration that I was compelled to start again immediately from a different place. It has been just over twenty years since I really looked at my childhood home as an artist. I suddenly knew that these rugs that were inside me would be different than anything I had done before. Twenty years of living changes the story even when it is one you are looking back upon. Our memories are living and breathing because they are part of us. I knew I had to see it again through my own hand.

It came from something deep inside me. It was time to go back and begin again. Years after leaving we can still well up at the mention of home. We are still pondering the memory of it, even when we are happy somewhere else. It remains with us all our lives, following us from place to place and settling down with us wherever we do.

My memories of home have changed and melded together with my life here in Nova Scotia. It too is home. Over time your love for home becomes less of a lament as you make a life somewhere else, you understand that a home must be built upon a foundation of faith and love and beauty and kindness.

My thoughts still wander back to my childhood home. The house I grew up in pitched on a hill, tall and straight as if it might topple down over the hill on which it was perched. I go to the community that surrounded my house, that place I knew from birth, that place where a part of me will always belong. Now though these memories have melded together with Nova Scotia where I have lived for over thirty years.

I am so grateful that this collection of rugs belongs to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia where they will be cared for for years to come.