After a wintry afternoon drive amid the world-class scenery of Grey Bruce County I arrived at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery for the Opening of Convergence on Sunday, January 13, 2012. The gallery was ALIVE with two exhibitions running concurrently; Convergence and Teaching a Stone to Talk by Barbara Todd. It was wonderful to meet so many dedicated art lovers from Owen Sound out to support the gallery on a Sunday afternoon. Most of the Convergence artists were in attendance and it was great to meet several of them.

I had the pleasure to chat with Barbara Todd and to discuss her impressive body of work. Teaching a Stone to Talk is the result of her obsessive gathering from three sources; her decades long collecting of stones at the beach along the shores of Lake Huron that began when she was a child, collecting of gems of speech from passing conversations and collecting bits of text. 

Barbara had several suggestions to my question, “how to arrange a touring exhibition” and indicated that Teaching a Stone to Talk was three years in the making and began with a meeting at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery when she was holidaying at her family cottage in the area.