Drown, Ophelia began with one of literature’s most enduring images: a woman floating somewhere between life and death.
In Hamlet, Ophelia’s death happens beyond our view. Gertrude instead describes her falling into the water, her clothing carrying her briefly “mermaid-like” before becoming saturated and pulling her beneath the surface.
That suspended moment became the foundation for these photographs.
Barb and I have known each other since 2005, but this was one of our first deliberately artistic collaborations. Creating it meant wading knee-deep through lake muck at Colliery Dam in Nanaimo, positioning fabric and body against dark water and discovering how much less cooperative reality is than imagination.
Rather than literally reconstructing Shakespeare or the countless artworks Ophelia has inspired, the series reduces the scene to its essentials: a woman, a pale dress and seemingly bottomless water.
The project also became an early milestone for my photography. An image from Drown, Ophelia was among the first of my photographs ever published, appearing in Portal Magazine.
For centuries, artists have returned to Ophelia and the strange beauty surrounding her death. This is my contribution to that conversation.
There are no flowers here.
Only Ophelia.
And the water.
