Marlene Creates
- Mary Modeen
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- Apr 15, 2021
- 2 min read
Marlene Creates is a Canadian environmental artist living and working on the island of Newfoundland / Ktaqmkuk. She is not a studio artist who makes things—she has worked outside since the late 1970s. For half that time, the focus of her work has been on one particular place—6-acres (2.4 hectares) of old-growth boreal forest, traversed by the Blast Hole Pond River, where she has been living since 2002.
From early ephemeral land art to her ongoing engagement with the boreal forest, her multidisciplinary practice emphasizes moments over monuments. She says, “Underlying all my work has been an interest in place—not as a geographical location but as a process that involves layers of memory, multiple narratives, ecology, language, politics, emotions, and both scientific and vernacular knowledge.”
Her hybrid processes include photography, video, poetry, memory map drawing, and site-specific multidisciplinary collaborative guided walks. “My work doesn’t come from my imagination, but from paying attention to what’s already there.”
Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally. She has received many awards, including a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for “Lifetime Artistic Achievement”; the Order of Newfoundland & Labrador, the province’s highest honour; and an Honorary Doctorate (D. Litt.) from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Marlene Creates acknowledges that she lives and works on the island that is the unceded ancestral homeland of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq peoples. With her work, she strives to create meaningful relationships between people and place, while honouring over 8,000 years of stewardship of the provincial territory by a succession of Indigenous people.
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