Marlene Creates


A Virtual Walk of
The Boreal Poetry Garden

Click on the image above to start.

The artist gratefully acknowledges her long-standing gratitude to The Canada Council for the Arts and Arts NL (formerly the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council).


"Underlying all my work as an environmental artist 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."
     —Marlene Creates

Key words
artist's garden
art and mapping
boreal forest poetry
Boreal Poetry Garden
eco-aesthetics, eco-art
eco-phenomenology
eco-poetry
embodied ecology
environmental art
environmental poetry
geoaesthetics
land-based art
landscape and poetry
memory mapping, alternative mapping,
    participatory mapping, counter
    mapping
Newfoundland artist
Newfoundland dialect
Newfoundland poetry
phenomenology and art
phenomenology and poetry
photo-landworks
photo-installations
place-based poetry
place-based performance art
poetry art garden
poetry garden walks
poetry walks
site-specific poetry
site-specific performance art
video-poetry, video-poems
walking artist
walking poet

Land acknowledgement
In acknowledgement of those who were here before me, I am grateful to live and work in the unceded ancestral homeland of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Previous to European settlement, the provincial territory had been inhabited for over 8 thousand years by a succession of people who have been called the Maritime Archaic Indians, the Thule, the Groswater and Dorset Eskimos.  
    The boreal forest habitat is the home of moose, caribou, black bear, lynx, red fox, weasel, mink, pine marten, hares, wolf, chipmunks, shrews, mice, beaver, otter, muskrat, coyote, bats, voles, squirrels, and numerous species of birds.


Gallery Representation
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
Toronto.

Member
of the Ecoart Network since 2013;
of art.earth since 2017;
of walk.listen.create since 2019;
of the Walking Artists Network 

News
Recent interviews
"Artist of the Month", an interview with Walter Lewis for art.earth based at Dartington Hall, UK, April 1, 2022.

Marlene Creates in conversation with Richard Povall, director of art.earth, April 2022 (36 min).

"Winter Walk" with Andrea McGuire, The Morning Show, CBC Radio One, St. John's, February 10, 2022.

"Interview with Marlene Creates," Member Voice & Guide, Chamber of Commerce, Portugal Cove-St. Philip's, Newfoundland, August 2022.

Current Exhibitions
How Do I Look? Ways of Understanding Art, group exhibition,
The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery,
St. John's, Newfoundland
October 21, 2023–ongoing

The Art of Nature, permanent collection group exhibition,
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
February 6, 2024–ongoing

Watershed, group exhibition,
Paul Petro Contemporary Art,
Toronto
September 6–October 5, 2024

A Community of Trees,
online group exhibition, Embassy Cultural House, London, Ontario
March 1, 2024–ongoing

Gather: In Celebration of Year of the Arts, group exhibition,
The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery,
St. John's, Newfoundland
May 18–September 22, 2024

Directors Collect: 110 Years,
group exhibition, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario
June 27, 2024–January 5, 2025
 
Presentations & Workshops, 2023

"The politics and poetics of walking ethnographies," panel at the 9th Ethnography and Qualitative Research conference, University of Trento, Italy, June 7–10, 2023. (online)

"GardenShip and State: A Book is a World" panel at Wordsfest,
Museum London, London, Ontario.
Sunday, November 5, 2023 at 3 pm.

Recent Honours
Honorary Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.),
Memorial University, St. John's
May 28, 2024
Recording of the convocation
The Oration by Annette Staveley starts at 1:19:27; the Address to the Convocation by Marlene Creates starts at 1:33:40

Invested into The Order of Newfoundland and Labrador,
September 1, 2021.
Government of Newfoundland Labrador news release.
The ceremony.
CBC report.
VOCM report.


Recipient of a Best of Portugal Cove-St. Philip's Community Award: the inaugural "Artist of the Year" Award,
announced August 12, 2021.

Recipient of a 2019 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts for "Lifetime Artistic Achievement":
- video portrait of Marlene Creates by The Canada Council for the Arts, directed by Luc Bourdon.
"Artist Spotlight: Marlene Creates," by Anita Barak, Canada Council Art Bank, posted July 10, 2019.
"Portrait de l’artiste : Marlene Creates," par Anita Barak, Banque d’art du Conseil des arts du Canada, 10 juillet 2019.
   
Recipient of the Mary MacDonald Award for Excellence in Visual Arts (EVAs) from VANL-CARFAC (Visual Artists Newfoundland and Labrador), which "thanks an individual or organization whose efforts have helped to sustain and build the visual arts sector," presented June 14, 2019.

Recent Commission
Walking & Memory Mapping
a project for Engage with Nature-Based Solutions, an initiative led by the University of Victoria, BC, with funding by Environment and Climate Change Canada and ArtsNL, 2024.

Recent books and publications
Sarah Bassnett and Sarah Parsons. Photography in Canada, 1839–1989: An Illustrated History, Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2023 (p.214).

Denise Lawson and Angela Somerset. to speak out what you see. there is nothing contrived, Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC, 2022.
(to download a pdf of the publication)

Susan Gibson Garvey, Andrea Kunard, Robert Macfarlane, Don McKay, and Joan M. Schwartz. Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses, Goose Lane Editions and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 2017.
also available in a French edition: Marlene Creates : Lieux, sentiers et pauses

Carmen Concilio. "Marlene Creates: Land, Nature, and the Forest as Poetry/Museum" in Dialogues between Media,
ed. Paul Ferstl, De Gruyter, Berlin (Germany), vol.5, 2021, p.437–454.

Marlene Creates. "Tuning and Being Tuned By a Patch of Boreal Forest: Works from The Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, Canada." In Trees in Literatures and the Arts: HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene, Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione, eds. Lexington Books, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Ecocritical Theory and Practices series, Lanham, Maryland, USA, 2021.

Mireille Eagan et al. Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador, The Rooms Corporation, St. John's, and Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, 2021.

Cynthia Imogen Hammond. “Glacier, Plaza, and Garden: Ecological Collaboration and Didacticism in Three Canadian Landscapes" in the Special Issue "Eco-Didactic Art, Design, and Architecture in the Public Realm," Sustainability, MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), Basel, Switzerland, posted May 20, 2021.

Carmen Concilio. "Landscape/ mindscape/ langscape: The ephemerality of the digital and the real in Marlene Creates's video-poems for ice and snow,"
Neohelicon, online journal, posted June 15, 2021.

Marlene Creates. "Award Ribbons for Places." In Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities,
Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fremantle, and Aviva Rahmani, eds.
New Village Press, New York, 2022.

Video tour
by Jon Pedersen of the retrospective exhibition, Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses / Marlene Creates : Lieux, sentiers et pauses — at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, September 23, 2017–January 21, 2018.

Some past interviews
Marlene Creates: Precise Moments in Particular Spots
with Caitlin Chaisson for Far Afield, posted October 2, 2018.

The Proust Questionnaire: Marlene Creates
National Gallery of Canada online magazine, 2014.

On Leaving Only Footprints
with Walter Lewis, University of Sunderland, UK, 2014.

Atlas Place: Understanding Where We Are
with Glenn Bach, Mar Vista, California, USA, 2014.

Impermanence and Temporality
with Leah Oates, NY Arts Magazine, 2008.





copyright (c) Marlene Creates