Courtesy of Caitlind R. C. Brown
Local artist Katie Green is no stranger to travelling for her art having done projects in the United States India Nepal and Sri Lanka. Her latest exhibition In Stillness is the product of 21 days spent canoe-bound in some of Canada’s most remote wilderness last fall.
Alongside five other artists a documentary film crew scientists a nurse and a guide Green spent three weeks on the Peel River in the Yukon and Northwest Territories as part of a multidisciplinary excursion called The Peel Project (thepeel.ca). The 68000-square-kilometre Peel Watershed is one of Canada’s last undeveloped watersheds but its future is now uncertain with the possibility of industrial development on the horizon. The Peel Project sought to tell a uniquely Canadian story by documenting the journey of six artists experiencing the north for the first time.
“This project wasn’t necessarily to take a political stance on what’s going on with the Peel Watershed” explains Green. “It was just to experience this landscape and… using art as the lens to experience this area of nature.”
Green says she was attracted to the project primarily for the opportunity to be completely removed from city life and immerse herself in nature. “My work for the past three years has been about humans’ connection with nature — and I stress the word ‘connection’ because when I went on this trip I think that that’s what I was really searching for” she says “this connection with this landscape with nature with the stillness that I thought I might find there these moments of quiet these moments of connectivity.”
That’s not exactly what she found though; in fact the immensity of the wilderness and lack of creature comforts left her feeling vulnerable and disconnected from the landscape although not necessarily in a negative way. “I felt like the landscape was indifferent to me being there because it’s so vast and because there [are] no humans there because it’s not built for humans” she says. After returning from the trip she decided to embrace those feelings of isolation and vulnerability in creating the work for In Stillness.
The exhibition is a series of drawings watercolours and paintings as well as a small installation of objects Green brought back from her trip. “Some of them [the works of art] are more directly related to an actual sketch that I did on the Peel but most of them are actually more related to the process I had afterwards of trying to conceptualize what that trip really meant to me and some of the specific moments I had” she says.
Re-creating her experience was not without challenges — constant travel by river meant that her impressions of her surroundings were fleeting and the cold also caused her camera’s batteries to die.
You’ll find a lot of natural imagery in Green’s flowing artwork and although the exhibition isn’t an obvious commentary on the Peel watershed and its current political situation a teaser of the documentary will also be shown for some context. In fact she says “This is probably the most personal body of work I’ve ever created.”
Like much of her work In Stillness is influenced by getting outside her comfort zone. “Every time I travel to a new place I learn more about myself” she adds. “I have to step outside of myself or my little bubble and this always directly influences how I do my work because my work is so connected to my sense of self.”
The Peel Projects’ artists have six months to complete their art and the full body of work is slated for exhibition in Toronto Whitehorse and Vancouver.
In Stillness runs until January 31 at Artpoint Gallery.
