Charles Ambrose is the pen name of the visual artist, writer, diarist, and art historian Dr. Chris Meigh-Andrews. He was born in Essex, England and lived in Montreal, Canada from 1957-1975. He studied photography, film, and fine art and has worked as a photographer, film animator and video editor and began working with video in a fine art context in 1977. Meigh-Andrews has exhibited his single screen and video installations widely both within the UK and internationally. During the 1990’s, he developed a distinctive body of installation work combining video with renewable energy. In parallel with his art practice, Meigh-Andrews has had an academic career, latterly as an art historian and writer. His book “A History of Video Art”, (Berg, 2006, and Bloomsbury 2013) has also been published in Japanese and Chinese. He is Editor-in-Chief (UK & Europe) of the forthcoming three volume “Encyclopaedia of New Media Art” (Bloomsbury, 2025) “The Grandfather Paradox” is his first novel.
The so-called “grandfather paradox” (also known as the consistency paradox) is a temporal paradox that occurs when an aspect of the past is changed in any way, thus creating a contradiction.
During August 2024, Chris Meigh-Andrews was writer-in-residence at Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where he was able to work on the novel and conduct research on the locations where his grandfather AWJ Andrews ("Jack") spent his first few months in Canada before heading to Calgary to work on the CPR railway and then to the Backus Brooks Paper Company in Kenora, Ontario.
