The Ridgeway Windows

Ted Goodden’s one-person exhibition of stained glass, The Ridgeway Windows, showed at the McIntosh Gallery, University of Western Ontario, and will tour the Thames River basin to the Chatham Cultural Centre and Woodstock Art Gallery later in the year.

Goodden’s work is concerned with ideas of home, place and region. In his artist’s statement in the catalogue accompanying the show,
Goodden writes:
"I hope my work contributes to a renewed understanding of regional art. I feel that the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more – rather than less – important in a world of diminishing spatial boundaries, a world in which exchange, movement and communication now have little relationship to geography. More than ever, a regional perspective is needed to mediate between the personal and the increasingly alarming global; to serve as a lens, to help locate the individual in a physical community.

Wendell Berry writes about the need for “placed persons” but perhaps the Asian philosopher Dogen says it best:
“When you find yourself where you are, practice occurs.”