Selected Works from 24 Years in a Patch of Old-Growth Boreal Forest on Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2002–2026
Marlene Creates
In conjunction with the Contact Photography Festival, new publication
May 1 - June 6, 2026
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present selected works by Marlene Creates.
Since 2002, a six-acre patch of old-growth boreal forest traversed by the Blast Hole Pond River, situated in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland/Ktaqmkuk, has been the site of Marlene Creates’s home and studio, and the source of her subject matter. This exhibition presents a selection of work from her multi-year “slow” engagement with this one particular place. Creates says, “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.”
This exhibition brings together a selection of photographic works by Newfoundland artist Marlene Creates, depicting connections between terrestrial and celestial natural phenomena—the link between them sometimes direct, sometimes possible, and sometimes poetic. Referencing celestial events through terrestrial images and text, the artist invites us to question the role of artistic authorship in the documentation of the natural world. The exhibition also includes a nine-part section of Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007–2026, where the artist documented her relationship to seventy-seven trees, once as a black and white silver print and eleven years later as a colour digital print.
Diptychs from the series What Came to Light at Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland 2015–ongoing include photographs of wildlife captured by motion-detection trail cameras, each presented with a line of text referring to a celestial event that occurred when an animal triggered the shutter. The singular events juxtaposed in each image-text pairing are just two of countless natural phenomena—perceptible and imperceptible—that occurred at the same time. Creates reflects, “This series is about the possibilities for artistic agency when I deliberately relinquish being the photographer and leave it to a trail camera.”
Photographic excerpts from the series Between the Earth and the Firmament, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2020 position the viewer, as the artist placed herself, in the “boundary layer”—the thin layer of air between the surface of the ground and the atmosphere. Creates photographed the ground where she lay down in the six-acre (2.4 hectare) patch of old-growth boreal forest where she has lived and worked since 2002, and photographed what she saw overhead as she lay there. The images represent the visual dimensions of her experience, and her hand-written field notes under each photograph identify some of the natural phenomena she saw, heard, smelled, and felt as she lay in place.
Marlene Creates: Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007–2026, a monograph published by Impulse[b:], was launched at the opening on Friday, May 1, 2026. This publication reproduces the complete series of photographs taken over nineteen years, documenting the artist’s connection to 77 particular trees amongst the thousands in the patch of old-growth boreal forest where she lives and works. You can purchase the publication here.
With the assistance of ArtsNL, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.
Presented as a Core Exhibition of the CONTACT Photography Festival.
MARLENE CREATES is an environmental artist. For over forty-five years her art has been an exploration of the reciprocal relationships between human experience, memory, language, and the land. Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally. In 2001 Marlene Creates was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and in 2019 she received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. She was named to the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2021, and in 2024 she received an Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from Memorial University of Newfoundland.