Mark Morris has just completed a two-year appointment as Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

He is Canada's most widely-performed librettist. His operas for adults have been performed in Wales, Canada, the US, and Sweden. His operas for children and adults, as part of the KidsOp project, have been performed in England, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and South Africa, notably at the Royal Albert Hall, The Banff Festival of the Arts, and at the Wexford Festival Opera. His work has won the Opera America Chamber Opera Competition and a Cable & Wireless International Childnet Award.  recent choral works have included commissions from the University of Alberta for their Centennial, with composer Mark Sirett, premiered in the Winspear Centre in Edmonton, and a commission from the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition, with composer Mervyn Burtch, premiered at the National Concert Hall of Wales.

He has written a book on the change from Anglo-Saxon to Norman England, Domesday Revisited, and one on twentieth century classical music, the Pimlico Dictionary of 20th-Century Composers, now available complete on the web at http://www.musicweb-international.com/Mark_Morris/index.htm. His past work has included theatre and opera design and stage direction, writing the words for James Coleman's Eire entry in the Amsterdam Biennial, a multi-media installation in an exhibition at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, and extensive reviewing of classical music. He has taught for the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta since 2000, and at Concordia University College of Alberta since 2005.

Photography, particularly digital photography, is now his main creative interest. His most recent project was  for the University of Alberta's 100th Anniversary year, photographing what catches his eye at the University, seen at Edmonton in 2009, and to be seen in Vancouver in the summer of 2009.

I started getting really interested in the structures and shapes of the human and natural landscape when designing for the theatre at Oxford in the 1970s. But designing for the theatre never quite satisfied my embryonic visual creative aims, and eventually I switched to writing the words for operas. I have always taken photographs, but it wasn't until I bought an early domestic point-and-shoot digital camera, to record the KidsOp project rehearsals, that I realized that the new format had the potential to do exactly what I had wanted to do all those years.

The timing was just right - having written nine operas in fourteen years, I was rather burnt out with words for composers - and so I started taking photographs seriously. Artistically, I concentrate on subjects whose form and structures and patterns interest me, be they human or natural. I definitely learnt this designing for the theatre, where my designs strongly utilized shapes and patterns, and the way I look at things is connected with music, where structures and patterns are so important.

Some of my photographs are 'straight', others are digitally processed, but I have a rule that any digital processing must be equivalent to the kind of processing one used to do in the film dark room. In other words, the actual picture composition is not changed - it is simply open to far more processing opportunities than in the old dark room days.

In many ways, I see the possibilities - for myself at least - as being more equivalent to the old art of print-making, rather than to the art of film photography.

Digital photography is still in its early days, and I am very much a learner. But it exactly fulfills what I want to do artistically, though I am planning to take the artistic idea one stage further by trying to marry my pictures, for exhibition, to specially created electronic music based on the structures in the actual picture it will accompany.

In terms of the pictures on this web site, most of my pictures are designed to be printed fairly large (13" x 19" or larger). I also print them on various media, especially watercolour and velvet art paper. So the strictures of the web - especially size and colour - means that the pictures here only approximate what the photographs actually look like, and, of course, the textures of those papers are completely missing.

Mark Morris