Between the Earth and the Firmament: Variations on a Theme, Newfoundland 2015–2022
Marlene Creates
a feature exhibition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
April 7 - May 13, 2023
This exhibition brings together a selection of photographic works by Newfoundland artist Marlene Creates, depicting connections between terrestrial and celestial natural phenomena—the link between them sometimes direct, sometimes possible, and sometimes poetic. Referencing celestial events through terrestrial images and text, the artist invites us to question the role of artistic authorship in the documentation of the natural world.
Diptychs from the series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing include photographs of wildlife captured by motion-detection trail cameras, each presented with a line of text referring to a celestial event that occurred when an animal triggered the shutter. The singular events juxtaposed in each image-text pairing are just two of countless natural phenomena—perceptible and imperceptible—that occurred at the same time. Creates reflects, “This series is about the possibilities for artistic agency when I deliberately relinquish being the photographer and leave it to a trail camera.”
Photographic excerpts from the series Between the Earth and the Firmament, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2020 position the viewer, as the artist placed herself, in the “boundary layer”—the thin layer of air between the surface of the ground and the atmosphere. Creates photographed the ground where she lay down in the six-acre (2.4 hectare) patch of old-growth boreal forest where she has lived and worked since 2002, and photographed what she saw overhead as she lay there. The images represent the visual dimensions of her experience, and her hand-written field notes under each photograph identify some of the natural phenomena she saw, heard, smelled, and felt as she lay in place.
The artist explains, “Everything in the cosmos and everything on Earth—every leaf, every stone, every drop of water, and every creature—is the result of the 14-billion-year history of the constantly-changing universe, from which we’re borrowing the atoms in our sensing bodies.”
Thirty-five photographs of the full moon and its representation—painted on wooden doors of fishing stages on Fogo Island—are assembled together in one composite, titled Full Moons, Fogo Island, Newfoundland 2022. In this work, the artist pays tribute to the island’s traditional red fishing stages—the small sheds on elevated wooden platforms along the shore in which fish are processed for salting and drying. These structures are precious and precarious in many ways, and are even more vulnerable in the current moment, under the threat of rising sea levels and increasing storm surges. The painted white circles on the doors of the stages not only are pleasingly decorative, but also have the practical function of making the doors visible in the dark. Before there were any street-lights on Fogo Island, these white shapes reflected light from lanterns, and any moonlight they reflected created a direct link between the Moon and its round, painted symbol. Creates muses, “I like to think of such guides helping my Fogo Island ancestors in the time before there was any electricity on the island.”
Describing her work over the past forty years, the artist says, “Underlying all my work has been an interest in place—not as a geographical location but as a process that involves memory, multiple narratives, ecology, language, and both scientific and vernacular knowledge.”
Presented in conjunction with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. With the assistance of ArtsNL, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.
MARLENE CREATES lives and works in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland & Labrador. For almost 40 years her work has explored the relationship between human experience and the land, and the impact they have on each other. Since the mid-1970s, her work has been presented in over 350 solo and group exhibitions and screenings across Canada (including several nationally touring solo exhibitions) and in Austria, China, Denmark, England, France, India, Ireland, Korea, Scotland, and USA. Since 2002 her principal artistic venture has been to closely observe and work with the 6 acres of boreal forest where she lives.
In 2015, Susan Gibson Garvey, guest curator at Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, NS, and Andrea Kunard, photography curator at the National Gallery of Canada, began preparations for a forty-year career retrospective of Creates’ work. They successfully applied for a MAP grant (2016) and established a touring exhibition, 2017- 2020, that premiered at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Frederictton, NB, and travelled to Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, NS, Confederation Art Centre Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI, Carlteton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, ON, and The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, St John’s, NFLD. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses, 204 pages, hardcover, printed in French and English editions.
Awards include the Artist of the Year Award from the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council (1996), the CARFAC National Visual Arts Advocate Award (2009), the VANL-CARFAC Long Haul Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts (2009); the BMW Exhibition Prize at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival for her exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art (2013), and the Grand Jury Award at the Yosemite International Film Festival (2014). She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2001.
In 2019 Marlene Creates received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for her lifetime artistic achievement.