MACKENZIE DUNCAN

Tsolum takes its name from a river on Vancouver Island — a river that was poisoned by a copper mine, and slowly brought back to life.

My family moved to a small log house on the Tsolum River in the early 1990s. My father was deeply involved with the Tsolum River Restoration Society for much of his life, part of the long effort to restore what had been lost. The river is now a salmon spawning river again. My father died nine years ago.

This work lives in the space between those two facts. It is about grief — personal and environmental — and the way both move through time without resolution, only change. I made these photographs trying to find a connection to that shared experience: the slow return of something, and the things that don't return.