Marlene Creates: The Cosmic Connectedness of Nature
Marlene Creates, September 15, 2015, from the series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print, 64.2 x 171.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Marlene Creates / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: NGC
The photographs in environmental artist Marlene Creates’ ongoing series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing were created on what she calls her “six-acre patch of old-growth boreal forest” in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland. The property is not just a setting for Creates’ art but also a muse, for it is in every way purposefully central to her art practice. Art and land and environment exist with, and inform, one another in the series, which began in 2015. Here, as in so much of Creates’ work, is the fundamental truth that everything everywhere is all at once part of a larger whole.
Everything, in one way or another, is also in constant motion, and not always in a straight line. Many things move in circular or spiraling patterns – from ocean currents on Earth to the ubiquitous Fibonacci sequence seen in tiny seashells and vast galaxies. Constantly, moons circle planets and planets circle stars in the night sky, all dimly illuminating the wild animals that are captured in Creates’ work, as they move through the forest on her property.
Three prints from the series – gifted by the artist to the Gallery in 2021 – are included in the Contemporary Galleries rotation The Art of Nature. On view are works by various artists who reveal the natural world as being “in a state of constant flux and change.” Creates’ photographs were shot by a trail camera set up and left alone in the woods on her property, and triggered by the motion of creatures that pass in the night. “I deliberately relinquish being the photographer and leave it to a trail camera,” Creates wrote about the series in 2016, published on her webpage. “I value the unpredictable, serendipitous, unintentional and off-centeredness of these photographs, while recognizing that wildlife move with intention and the celestial events in our galaxy happen with precise predictability.”
Marlene Creates, January 26, 2016, from the series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print, 64.2 x 171.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Marlene Creates / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: NGC
Creates’ determination is its own cycle of artistic motion, moving in harmony with the symphony of natural creation. She frequently creates diptychs or other dual juxtapositions. In this series, each photograph is paired with a text panel, with the latter being limited to a single sentence that succinctly describes a celestial event at the moment the photograph was triggered. “Heaven and Earth, if you like,” she states. “The events juxtaposed in each pair are just two of the countless natural phenomena – perceptible and imperceptible – that occurred at the same time.”
The images are decidedly off centre. In one, captured in January, the legs of two passing moose, partially over-exposed by the automatic flash and a reflective blanket of snow, are paired with the text “Waning gibbous Moon with Mercury in the morning sky.” Another, taken on a wet September night, shows the head and shoulders of a soggy moose alongside the words: “Last appearance of Saturn this year, low in the southwest sky.” And on one night in March, a silver fox passes on the far side of the Blast Hole Pond River, with the artist adding the sentence, “Planet Uranus vanishes into the twilight.”
Marlene Creates, March 17, 2016, from the series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print, 64.2 x 171.2 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Marlene Creates / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: NGC
Celestial bodies and earthly creatures are seen briefly, then vanish into the darkness of night or space, eternally synced by happenstance or (depending on individual belief) of creation. Everything vanishes, and everything returns, always and forever.
This is not Creates’ first foray into the dark night on her property. A 2012 work, also from Blast Hole Pond River, is a diptych with a grid of nine self-portraits beside a photograph of the full moon reflected in the river, titled About 8½ Minutes from the Sun to the Moon to the River to My Face to the Camera. Her accompanying poem recalls the nocturnal illumination: “A back-eddy pool gathers its shape, reflects the white light up to my face/then through the lens, while all around me/the boreal forest is spires of lacy black.”
Creates has a profound relationship with the land and environment, and to say that it is elemental to her art is no hyperbole, as a chance encounter with nature was, in its way, for her a Big Bang moment of art. When the Montreal-born artist was asked for her earliest memory of art in NGC Magazine’s Proust questionnaire in 2014, she replied: “Around 1960, one of the Montreal newspapers carried in their weekend section a series of full-page colour reproductions of wildlife paintings – a different animal each week in its habitat.” Ever since then, she has been fascinated and fuelled by nature, environment, habitat and how everything is linked.
Marlene Creates, Ottawa POPULATION 324 000, from the series Looking at the City of Ottawa from Ten Paces Outside the Municipal Boundaries, Ottawa Pre-Amalgamation 2000, 2000. Cibachrome print, 33.7 x 49.5 cm. Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa. © Marlene Creates / CARCC Ottawa 2024 Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Creates’ compelling interest extends to urban spaces. Her 2000 series of ten photographs, titled Looking at the City of Ottawa from Ten Paces Outside the Municipal Boundaries, Ottawa Pre-Amalgamation 2000, has her beside a highway with camera pointed at a generic road sign that reads “Ottawa POPULATION 324 000.” Somehow, the distance seems more than ten paces, as she strives to see more than what can literally be seen, and to be part of something of which she feels somehow outside.
Around that time, she did a series of such photographs, looking at similar signs on the boundaries of the cities of St. John’s, Québec and Hamilton. Perhaps most revealing was a project in Hamilton for which she posted her own signs that read HIDDEN HISTORIES AND INVISIBLE STORIES. Like the photographs captured by trail cameras in rural Newfoundland, of creatures moving about as the skies above seem both sublimely still and in constant motion, these signs signal her commitment to work that is not so much about what we see, as it is about what we do not see. “I am drawn to the extraordinary fact that all places – parks, factories, streets, homes – hide invisible dimensions other than what we can see,” she comments. “I hope these markers can provide a reason to stop and wonder for a moment about the unknowable dimensions embedded, saturated, in these places. And, like everywhere, these places will continue to change.”
Everywhere – urban and natural, terrestrial and celestial – are hidden histories and invisible stories that link everything together. We only have to open our eyes to see the hidden and invisible, and to behold the wonder of it all.
The works September 15, 2015, January 26, 2016 and March 17, 2016 by Marlene Creates, along with her video work Spots of Memory: what I remembered during one month away after six years on Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2008, are on view in B102 at the National Gallery of Canada. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.
