The Irish writer C.S. Lewis coined the term "shadowlands" as a description of earth being a shadow of heaven. Along with his many scholarly works on the subjects of Christianity and Medieval thought, Lewis also wrote a series of children's books called the Chronicles of Narnia. These books followed the adventures of the Pevensie children, their cousins and their friends, as they were magically transported to a mystical land of fauns, witches, and talking beasts called Narnia. The stories, while primarily serving as biblical allegory, drew much from the mythologies of the British Islands, and Scandinavia.
        In addition to his career as a writer Lewis also taught, along with W.B. Yeats, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, at Cambridge University. Together they and others formed the Inklings, a literary fellowship that met regularly to discuss views on writing and spirituality.
        Lewis' Narnian landscapes were as thoughtfully rendered as his subjects, and indeed had much to do with the overall meaning of the stories themselves. During my youth I read and reread the Chronicles of Narnia many times, often at our family summer home on an island in northern Canada. I have a deep connection to both the landscapes of Narnia, and to those our little island. In many ways my emotional sense of these places, occupies the same part of my childhood soul.
        When I began the Shadowlands project, my aim was to capture and photograph those feelings I had for this other world, so I set out to find those places in this one that gave me a familiar feeling or sense. Initially, I simply looked for settings that reminded me of places where woodland creatures might gather for a secret meeting, or for sites resembling specific locations from the Narnia stories. As the project grew I began to notice some unexpected images creeping up in my photos that I had not intended, and had somehow failed to realize at the time of shooting. These little surprises were often of faces depicting western gods, or shapes resembling mythological creatures, such as a Phoenix, a Goddess, a Pegasus, and a Griffin.
        As many aspects of the fantastic qualities in the landscape continued to encroach upon the imagery, I decided that I needed to extend my visual study, to encompass broader ideas of western mythology, especially in their relation to the landscape as archetype. In doing so, I began to investigate many of the ancient myths and poems of the Dark, and early Middle Ages of Western Europe. I studied the stories of the Mabinogin, written in Welsh prose, which contain the earliest references of King Arthur, and are dated to the Eight Century. The stories are heroic, soul shaking, and full of chivalry. There is much attention paid to the romantic landscape. The reader is transported to an eloquently described, and amazingly tangible world of the past. The effect is timeless, and you can almost feel the...

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