Colour Silos
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COLOUR SILOS
The New Standing Stones
There is an echo that calls to me every time I drive through the farming communities near my home in Grey County, Ontario. It is the ancient whisper of my great, great grandfather James Brandy’s voice that I hear floating over the fields of barley, hay, and corn. In 1855, James left behind the rolling farm fields of his home in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, that was dotted with ancient standing stones, to the verdant fields and forests of Perth County, Ontario, where he and his fellow immigrants cleared the land and erected another kind of standing stone, the now ubiquitous farm silo.
This project tells a story of ancestry, immigration, and resilience in a new world, through portraits of some of the earliest farm silos built in Ontario, Canada, by the colonial settlers of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I began this project to honour my ancestors’ lives in this new land – a life of perilous hard work, near starvation, and for James, a tragic end in 1872 when a barn fire took his life.
Today, many of the original structures built by these settlers; farmhouses, barns, sheds, and outbuildings, have long decayed and disappeared. The solid silo, however, remains the only vestige of those first colonial farms. Still standing tall as a lone sentinel that pays tribute to the advent of modern agriculture and settlement in Ontario.
To date, I have photographed over 50 farm silos near where my great, great grandfather settled and near where I currently live.
So, this series unfolds a visual story connecting colonial immigrants to the lands granted to them for cultivation and settlement, the creation of farms, towns, and a whole new way of life in a new world—including the New Standing Stones—a, perhaps unintentional hommage to the ancient Old World standing stones left behind.
