Stone Days is a diary of days. All kinds of days: good days, bad days, on days, off days, slow days, stone days.

For most of my life I spent part of every August at my grandparents’ cottage on the shores of Lake Huron. It was the one constant place in my life. Every summer I gathered stones from the beach. For as long as I can remember I have also gathered verbal gems from passing conversations and collected special bits of published text. It is a marvel to me how people use language.

In 2005 I assigned myself the task of selecting one text for each day. I let the text prompt me to make an arrangement of small stones on a light table. I made the arrangements quickly and intuitively. I then photographed, Photoshopped and printed each day's stone drawing onto vellum. The layering of these translucent images embodied the accumulation of presence, of memory dissolving into past days.

Using the 365 “stone drawings” as my vocabulary, I began to sort, count, print, layer, cut, sew and paint. I wrote and rewrote the stones into layered collage drawings, quilts, and wall relief works.

This body of work saw its most comprehensive exhibition in Barbara Todd: Teaching a Stone to Talk at the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario in 2012, only a 30-minute drive from my grandparents’ cottage. The title of the exhibition is after the short story by Annie Dillard. The title was used with permission.