A part of what drew me to photojournalism was the opportunity to explore pockets of the world I don’t understand, take some chances, and through all this learn about myself. Photographer Freeman Patterson summed it up nicely this evening on CBC Radio’s program Ideas when he said the lens points in two directions.

(Above) Mark Armstrong has been blowing glass for collectors and large corporate clients for 23 years. In 1994, Armstrong renovated an old feed mill into what would become his studio and shop in Prince Edward County’s Wellington, a village on the rise along the banks of Lake Ontario.

We spent a little over an hour sharing stories about how we came to be where we were while he formed 800 degree Celsius globs of molten glass into red pears without missing a beat. A second too long or too short risked sending the whole piece to the scrap bin. Watching Armstrong sculpt struck me as a kind of meditative dance to the roar of his three furnaces, the pops from discarded glass, and the internal melody choreographing his process with ease - an ease of course that’s over two decades in the making…