Tamar Griggs has been photographing her island community, passionately drawn to the people, events and changes in our villages for over twenty years now. Through her camera she has documented the fleeting moments in our lives and ultimately recorded history. The Faces of Salt Spring exhibit will be a showing at ArtSpring in the coming months. Over 300 islanders are in this series of photography and interviews, and if you are not in it, you are bound to know someone who is.

This weeks featured Face of Salt Spring is: Robert Bateman, 2007

I was born in Toronto, Ontario.

In the summer of 1979 I was zodiaking with Bristol Foster on the west side of Vancouver Island. It was a fabulous BC high and I fell in love with the feel of the whole West Coast experience. I asked Bristol, if I wanted to live in BC, where should I go, and he immediately said Salt Spring Island knowing we’d like to live near a school and a hospital and be near an airport yet have nature all around us. We immediately found a piece of land on Salt spring that very weekend. We didn’t start to build until 1984 and moved here in 1985.

My passions are art and nature. What I love most is nature, and the interesting people. Challenges to living here are the ferries.

Preface to Islands in the Salish Sea
A Community Atlas, Edited by Sheila Harrington and Judi Stevenson

Ever since I was a toddler, I have been absorbed by art and nature. In university, I studied geography. These three aspects of my life have come together in this atlas of the islands in the Salish Sea.

In our global, packaged world we are losing a sense of our place. This is a philosophical tragedy. It results in a lack of caring, a lack of sense of community and a neglect of civil responsibility. It is also an environmental and human tragedy. For with this loss of knowledge of and intimacy with our home place, we are also losing our sense of spirit.

The Islands in the Salish Sea Community Mapping Project, which produced this book, is a wonderful antidote to this poisoning of our spirit. If we pay attention to the particularity of the world around us, in all of its overlapping aspects, not only will we derive the joy of discovery, we will care. And caring is what really matters.

Robert Bateman
robertbateman.ca

Robert Bateman, 2007