Marlene Creates

Between the Earth and the Firmament, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2020 ( 3 excerpts from the series / extraits d’une série) 2020
Mixed media / Matériaux mixtes
Site 26 – Lester-Garland House, Trinity

Marlene Creates was a 2019 recipient of Canada’s highest visual arts honour, a Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts that celebrated her 40-year career as a now internationally-known environmental artist. These recent assemblages continue her employment of her boreal forest land and her own body to examine connections between humans and nature—and beyond. The works are specific to a place, moment and physical experience; yet conceptually they also are located in infinitely deep space and limitless time. In each, a rough drawing outlines her form lying on the ground in the thin “boundary layer” between earth and atmosphere; one photograph is of the ground beneath her, the other of the sky above. Each of us likewise is poised between earth/world and celestial sphere. But, as noted in the artist’s statement (overleaf), we each, like everything else on earth and in the cosmos, are composed of “borrowed” atoms within a universe constantly in flux.

The careful restraint and balance in Creates’ work was echoed in its site, the 18th-century red brick Lester-Garland House (Trinity) with the classical proportions and simplicity of Georgian architecture.

PG

Artist Statement 

My artwork is where the inside (my thoughts) and the outside (my surroundings) meet. In the patch of boreal forest where I live and work, both my daily activities and my artistic endeavours are profoundly physical and involve all my senses.

The drawings in these assemblages are not based on visual observation. They are frottages (rubbings) I made around myself while lying on the paper—the merest membrane between myself and the land. Wherever I lie down outside, I’m in what’s known as “the boundary layer”—the thin layer of air between the surface of the ground and the atmosphere. The drawings could be seen as a simple measurement of my humanness in relation to this terrain.

The photographs represent the visual dimensions of what was beneath me—such as the vegetation or the snow—and what I saw overhead while lying in place.

The hand-written texts in each work are from my field notes. They refer to some of the phenomena that were present. But most of what exists is imperceptible to the human eye: under the vegetation that I’m lying on are countless microscopic organisms as well as enormous geological formations; and overhead, beyond the tree canopy, there is even more matter in the immensity of the celestial sphere.

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.