Composition in Plaster and Lath
Alliston, Ontario - 2007

Owning a century home that is perpetually under renovation gives my partner Catherine and I plenty of opportunity to see things that have not seen the light of day for a very long time. Plaster and lath walls are a nightmare for demolition, tons of rubble, millions of little nails, dust everywhere and no shortage of surprizes as to what is covering them or hidden behind them. We have come to appreciate the amount of work that went into the construction of these walls, and to appreciate the beauty they reveal in the process of deconstruction.

I wanted to capture the beauty of this compostion in the ancient wall paper, chunks of random plaster and the strong lines of the lath behind. I also wanted to honour the men who built our house and erected these walls. Over a hundred years ago they took thousands of strips of wood and tens of thousands of little nails and individually hammered each strip of lath on rough studs and then carefully plastered each wall and ceiling by hand. These walls stand as testimony to a long lost trade practiced by tradesmen who have also long passed out of memory.