First published in 2004 in a hand-printed limited edition, this collaboration between New Brunswick printmaker Dan Steeves and Nova Scotia writer Mark Harris is now being released in an affordable trade paperback edition. Featuring reproductions of nine original intaglio prints with nine corresponding prose responses, this edition makes widely available Harris and Steeves’ unique artistic correspondence.

Steeves calls the project “a visual and verbal dialogue about place and hope, and the difference that both can make in this life.” Since the early 1990s, his striking prints have been gaining recognition, both in Canada and abroad. The prints in The Light that Lives in Darkness are notable for the complexity of the negative spaces–the skies, snowy fields, open roads, and coves along the Bay of Fundy. These are spaces that seem to embody flux and accumulation, a sense of history and the weight of an unpredictable future. Steeves uses these outdoor landscapes to reflect internal moods of singularity and isolation, alternating heaviness and flights of faith and hope.

In speaking about the project, Harris said, “I wanted to articulate some of the interior spiritual landscapes in Dan’s work.” The psychological depth of Steeves’ work, in particular the cohabitation of things vague and articulate, is picked up in Harris’s meditations. Focusing on the surprising resilence of faith, questions of permanence and vulnerability, and on a more specific relationship with the Bay of Fundy shore, Harris unravels some of the turmoil in these prints. Several of the meditations begin with questions–about quality of life, about choices and about the presence of one who knows us better than we know ourselves. Working from the lowest emotional troughs and the sudden clarity that arrives when faith is tested, Harris’s prose is imaginative and provocative, taking us into the darkest regions of Steeves’ prints and pointing back to the lightest.