Marlene Creates, Territory, Memory, Language – Pierre Dessureault

[Winter 2025]

Territory, Memory, Language
by Pierre Dessureault

For more than forty years, the Newfoundland environmental artist Marlene Creates has been quietly and carefully building an impressive body of work in which the notions of territory, memory, and language are in constant dialogue. The relevance, formal innovation, and expressive strength of her singular voice, mobilized through photography, video, and sound, has been showcased in numerous exhibitions and publications and has earned Creates national awards and distinctions.1 In an early group of land art works, produced between 1979 and 1985 and documented in photographs, Creates explored the earth as a territory. For Paper, Stones and Water, she unfurled long strips of white paper on the ground to capture traces of natural forces: water, dew, wind, tides, and waves marked the paper, now a sen­sitive surface that, like a photographic image, fixed and captured the fluid impermanence of natural cycles. Thus, Creates’s gesture, immersed in living nature, is perpetuated in the suspended present time of the image.

Creates situates her work in an intimate experience with the earth and the land. In many series dating from this period, including Sleeping Places, Newfoundland (1982) and A Hand to Standing Stones, Scotland (1983), she involved her own body: in the former the impression that her body left on the ground during the night, and in the latter her hand touching the rough-textured surfaces of megaliths. The simplicity of the images – the single point of view and the repe­ti­­tion of a single gesture – condensed the fixed time of the bodily experience of the natural environment in the senses of touch and sight. Arranged in a grid, the images of these timeless moments are juxtaposed against each other to offer a legible totality in which viewers can become absorbed.

Translated by Käthe Roth

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Marlene Creates, Territory, Memory, Language – Pierre Dessureault]

Notes

  1. 1 The catalogue for the retrospective exhibition Marlene Creates: places, paths and pauses (Fredericton: Beaverbrook Art Gallery and Goose Lane Editions, 2017), edited by curators Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard, offers diverse interpretations on Creates’s work, and the website marlenecreates.ca offers a richly documented survey of her body of work.