i began working with shelagh carter as she was developing the collage technique for rifting / blue and shelagh invited me to look at and explore my responses to the series of foundational images she had collected. my immersion in that element led to the creation of the track that i wrote and sang in the film, a piece i further developed for a long poem called bath. bath appeared in murderous signs in 2006, and continued to explore ophelia’s descendants trapped in “dull beds,” and “nights unmagical,” who “unbutton their eyes and slip through portraits hung round their necks avid to appear on their own terms. shelagh and i continued to collaborate on resolve, a dance piece by natasha torres-garner which examined her commitment to creativity and the possibilities of creation. inspired by our capacity to share both vision and process, we began the development of canoe which takes its impulse from a novel that i had just completed, jane dying again. the novel reveals the grief, loss, and despair experienced by partners in a long-time marriage who are caught in the prison built by a chronic illness, suffered equally by the wife as caregiver and the husband as incurable. the film integrates found footage into its mise-en-scène technique to underline the way in which memory haunts the present, mangling the edges of the couple’s endurance.