Seed Bank

As an artist and filmmaker active in Toronto since the mid-1980s, Rynard has worked across a range of approaches: dramatic, experimental, documentary, and installation. Her work conveys a prevailing sense of memory and place. Drawn to science in recent years, as a departure point for artistic inquiry, Seed Bank (2011) is one in a series of media installations that explore the profoundly human construction we call nature.

"These photographs were taken at the Millennium Seed Bank just outside London UK. This seed bank, like others around the world, functions as a repository for endangered plant life and as an insurance policy against near apocalyptic disaster, and/or the current biodiversity crisis wherein 38% of the world's known plant species are threatened with extinction.”

"Far from being the Garden of Eden one might expect from this repository of all things green, the seed bank is a hi-tech controlled environment, which can only be viewed through multiple layers of glass. In making these images, I wanted to draw out the unexpected ways that the reflections in the glass merge the inside workings of the seed bank with the natural environment that surrounds it. In this way, the photos capture the incongruous function of a seed bank -- an elaborate man-made fortress created to protect the natural world from the destruction that we as humans have caused.”


Su Rynard is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and was a Director Resident at the Canadian Film Centre. Her work has garnered multiple awards including: the Pariscience Prix Buffon, a Hot Docs Top Ten Audience Award and the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize. The National Gallery of Canada, The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Wexner Centre For The Arts, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre have purchased or programmed film and video by Su Rynard. An in-depth discussion of her work is featured in Mike Hoolboom’s 2008 book Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists published by Coach House Books, Toronto.