Betwixt and Between

“Thus he swims in a strange indeterminate mean,
Neither hallow’d nor damn’d, but betwixt and between.”
– Anthony Pasquin, The Children of Thespis (1789)

Betwixt and Between explores liminality; the in-between space bridging a thirty-year military career and civilian life as a veteran living with PTSD. Rooted in a long personal history with the Rideau Canal, the work treats the waterway as both subject and metaphor: its upstream flow recalls the past, its downstream course invites the future, and each bridge becomes a pause in the present where past and future converge.

This early set of images reflects the first stages of the project: learning the cadence of a wooden 6×6 pinhole camera, developing film at home, and experimenting with the Canal’s own water and eco-friendly chemistry. The fully analog process rejects digital distraction in favour of slowness and presence: long exposures timed with a mechanical watch, notes recorded with a fountain pen, and the material impurities of water leaving their trace on the negative.

Influenced by Yan Wang Preston’s geographic structuring, Nadav Kander’s metaphorical river narratives, and Susan Derges’ direct engagement with water, the project frames slowness and mindfulness as acts of resistance and recovery. What emerges is not yet a sequence, but a set of thresholds: quiet markers of resilience, healing, and change.

Betwixt and Between is the opening chapter of Meditations on the Rideau, a long-form analog meditation on water, time, and heritage. As the Canal approaches its bicentennials of construction commencing (1826) and opening (1832), the work extends from this prototype into a sustained practice: pinhole exposures, canal-water development, and archival engineering drawings brought back into the light.

Learn more: Meditations on the Rideau