I spend 18 months in Calgary. It's a nice city, close to the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, Banff, Lake Louise, etc. Culturally I struggled. There's lots of country music, the Stampede, and a surprisingly rich local arts community. But, it wasn't a fit for me.

While I was living there I used to get together with photographers for occasional walkabouts, typically shooting my Leica M3. I found it a challenge to pull out something interesting in what I saw as leftover brutalist architecture and an almost complete absence of people in the CBD. In retrospect it was my own lack of enthusiasm for the city which stood in the way of my creativity.

Anyway, during my time in Calgary, 'The Bow' was completed. I thought it was a rather average but attractive enough building, and it was a symbol of the redevelopment of a tired city.

Spanish artist Jaume Plensa was commissioned to create a sculpture for the tower. Similar to some of his other works, he created a sculpture called Wonderland.

It was a nice enough sculpture, a white mesh child's head. It just didn't, to me, have anything to do with Calgary. Plus I'm not a fan of 'cute'. Wonderland looked cute to me, and Calgary wasn't cute. So, I set out to find something different.

As I moved around the sculpture, I saw what I was after. At a front, lower angle, the shapes in the building framed the head in a sinister way, and the windows, as the light was coming in from the South, looked like teeth. I tweaked the framing a bit and took the shot.

Maybe I was a bit hard on the sculpture, but I did like the irony of uncovering something sinister in the 'cute'. I guess the Semaphore editors liked it enough to use as a cover image.