Nature as Culture

These images are from my latest exhibition at the Trianon Gallery in Lethbridge, Alberta. The landscape in southern Alberta is a place rich with a diversity of plant communities, wildlife and riparian areas along rivers and streams. When walking in the coulees and the river valley I feel a connection to the land and a deep sense of time embedded in this place. The ground I am standing on was once a continental sea bed. The coulees were formed as the last glaciers retreated from our area and have been further eroded by water and wind. The landscape was once mostly covered by forests and eventually transformed into the grasslands of today. This area has a profound influence on my work and I endeavour to communicate this with the materials I have collected, assembled and formed to explore its sense of place. From the topographical studies that reference the fluid formations of the coulees and foothills, the bark and driftwood that float down the river and collect in driftwood piles during floods, to the variety of the plant communities that grow in the coulees I seek to celebrate the nature of this living prairie community as culture.