"... I was able to make a simple gesture which left no permanent mark on the land."In 1979 Marlene Creates signaled her intent. In contrast to the monumental earthworks of that time, she revealed that her interest in the intersection of art and the natural world was with the ephemeral, the small scale, and the non-monumental, and with place, "not as a geographical location," she writes, "but as a process that involves memory, multiple narratives, ecology, language, and both scientific and vernacular knowledge." Supplementing the impermanence of her artistic gestures with the technology of photography, Creates found an audience and created a body of work without peer.Creates has sensitvely probed the relationship between human experience and the natural world for almost four decades. From her early works that record traces of the human body on the land to her later explorations of poetry in situ in the boreal forest and photography as an active medium -- where the rush of water over the lens transforms the artist's own image -- Creates leads us with an environmental and cultural consciousness to a greater understanding of the language of the natural world and our "places" in it.It is no easy task to sum up, in a single book, a career that privileges the act over the artifact, the moment over the monument. But under the direction of curator-critics Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard, Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses offers not only a broad view of her work in photography but also a critical appreciation of her multi-disciplinary approach (assemblages, memory-map drawings, and video-poems) through essays by Gibson Garvey and Kunard, art historian Joan M. Schwartz, nature writer Robert Macfarlane, and poet Don McKay.Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses accompanies a major retrospective touring exhibition organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in partnership with the Dalhousie Art Gallery. It will open in Fredericton in September 2017 and thereafter will be shown at galleries in Halifax, Charlottetown, St. John's, and other venues in central and western Canada.

... jai pu intervenir simplement, sans laisser de traces durables sur le terrain. Jeune encore, lartiste Marlene Creates signalait deja en 1979 son intention de se demarquer des installations de terrassement monumentales de lepoque pour sinteresser, au confluent de lart et du monde naturel, a lephemere, a la petite echelle, au non monumental et au lieu, " pas tant comme endroit geographique, " ecrit-elle, " que comme processus qui inclut la memoire, une multiplicite de recits, lecologie, le langage et le savoir, tant vernaculaire que scientifique. " En palliant le caractere ephemere de ses interventions grace aux techniques photographiques, elle a su trouver son public et creer une uvre hautement originale. Depuis pres de quatre decennies, Creates sattarde avec sensibilite aux rapports entre lexperience humaine et le monde naturel. Des ses premieres uvres, preservant les empreintes du corps humain sur le sol, et jusqua ses plus recentes explorations de poesie in situ dans la foret boreale et de photographie comme medium actif, ou elle laisse le ruissellement de leau sur lobjectif brouiller son autoportrait, Creates exerce sa grande vigilance ecologique et culturelle pour nous amener a mieux comprendre le langage du monde naturel et les " lieux " que nous y occupons. Il est difficile de rendre compte en un seul volume dune carriere qui a prefere lacte a lartefact, le moment au monument. Or, sous la direction des commissaires-critiques Susan Gibson Garvey et Andrea Kunard, Lieux, sentiers et pauses propose au lecteur, en plus dune large gamme des uvres photographiques de Marlene Creates, un examen critique de sa demarche multidisciplinaire (assemblages, croquis de cartes-memoire et poemes sur video) grace aux essais de Gibson Garvey, de Kunard, de lhistorienne de lart Joan M. Schwartz, de lecrivain ecologiste Robert Macfarlane et du poete Don McKay. Marlene Creates : Lieux, sentiers et pauses accompagne limportante retrospective itinerante organisee par la galerie d'art Beaverbrook, en partenariat avec la Dalhousie Art Gallery. Apres son vernissage a Fredericton en septembre 2017, lexposition visitera Halifax, Charlottetown, St. Johns et dautres villes du centre et de louest du Canada.