Although my work has often been self-referential, psychological and physically - my current work focuses on my mother and her generation who were young women in the 1940s. By manipulating old photo-portraits and memoirs I seek to explore the experience of a unique population - war brides - young women in love but who were otherwise ill-prepared for the journey. Now according to a Maori proverb, I - her daughter - am "walking backward to the future."

This is a Mother's story entwined with others' stories. They were "all in the same boat" metaphorically, although, in reality, scores of "bride ships" or "stork ships" crisscrossed the globe during the mid-40's. In this way my Canadian mother awoke one morning to find herself on the other side of the world. What had she done?! Typically she would be met by a husband she barely recognized out of uniform, was in for a culture-shock, and would trade seasickness for homesickness. She - like most - felt the profound isolation of her one-way ticket eased by a single tenuous link, surface mail.

The images and text presented have grown out of my need, as a visual artist, to fill in the gaps in my mother's story, to connect the dots. I started with an old sepia photo and lo, a constellation appeared! She was one of thousands - no, of tens of thousands - of young women "all in the same boat."

Using rough wood or handmade paper as the support, most images are loosely based on old sepia photographs. An installation component - based on the intimacy of tears - utilizes images and fragments of text: recollections of transition, loneliness and loss. Each woman has a lachrymal, or tear bottle, partially filled, through which her reflections - both literal and figurative - are seen.

- Bev Tosh