The making of mock musical instruments began with blue guitars for the Hornby Island Blues Festival Art Show in May 2002. A line from a poem by Wallace Stevens: " Things as they are, are changed upon the blue guitar..." was given as an inspiration, and I imagined something from a cubist painting: fragmented, abbreviated, distorted, but nonetheless true to some essential quality.

The directive requiring that I work with the colour blue became an opportunity to further explore the seemingly endless permutations of this colour. The process led me to consider: Why just guitars and only blue? I began to envision and construct other strange , simple. evocative "instruments" in a widening range of colours.
The use of found materials in their construction, particularly the driftwood fragments of plywood. board and branch which comprise their bodies and necks, ensures forms which have been acted upon by natural forces, worn and weathered into unique variations on recognizable patterns.

And so this exploration of form and colour which I call Primitive Fiddles continues, with each individual "instrument " expressing a particular combination of qualities associated with both colour and sound.