Installation Evokes Alberta's Landscape

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Media guru Marshall McLuhan once wrote that fish know nothing about water “since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.” Printmaker Kelsey Stephenson came to understand this truth when she left her hometown of Edmonton to complete a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Tennessee. There, far from Alberta’s vast skies and the familiar ochres of prairie fields, she realized how the landscape seeps into our blood.

She decided to recreate it through a photomontage composed of aerial maps, her own photographs of the Badlands, and spidery ink reticulations. She printed these patterns onto Kitakata paper, a delicate but resilient Japanese paper made from mulberry bark, and laid them like a mosaic, across her studio floor. Then, with the prints drenched in puddling water, she walked onto them in bare feet, a bottle of ink in hand, for the last stage.

Originally configured as a 72-foot-long installation that runs from floor to ceiling, the work is presented in smaller sections at Edmonton’s McMullen Gallery, where it's part of  Stephenson's show, Embodied, on view until Feb. 26.  

Stephenson’s inspiration came in part from Chinese landscape painting. And like Su Shi, a Song dynasty poet and painter who described his art as “play with ink,” Stephenson allowed pigment to flow into dark pools, curve into rivulets and drip like black rain. Accidents and natural processes became her friends. At one point, she knocked over a bottle of ink. The resulting wrinkles became part of the topography.

Another fortuitous accident occurred when she was in a hurry and suspended some dried prints onto the studio wall by their top corners. As she rushed out the door, the tissue began to sway like wheat in a summer breeze.

Stephenson’s installation is ethereal: a fleeting moment of ink-flow frozen on paper. Paradoxically, it also feels primordial: meandering rivulets of pigment are like ancient topographies carved by rivers; billowing breezes arise and disappear, setting her work into timeless undulating motion. Accompanying audio by Alex Gray, a composition student from the University of Tennessee, immerses the viewer in a soundscape inspired by the drumbeat of raindrops, the whoosh of wind in wide, open spaces, and the crackling sound of glacial ice.

This meditative exhibition is set against the backdrop of the University of Alberta Hospital, a bustling acute-care facility that houses the gallery. Patients roll through in wheelchairs; families whose loved ones face life-and-death operations seek brief moments of respite. For people gripped by trauma, Stephenson’s gentle take on the Alberta landscape offers refuge. The landscapes of childhood heal and soothe like the familiar comforts of home.

McMullen Gallery

8440 112 St, University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2B7

780-407-7152

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