Marlene Creates: Walk, Talk and Memory Mapping, 16th May 2025
During May 2025 we were delighted to welcome to the Stroud Valleys Canadian Artist Marlene Creates. As a part of her programme while visiting the UK Marlene Marlene generously shared her extensive practice, delivering a talk and a hands-on memory mapping workshop.
Marlene showed works made in collaboration with Indigenous Inuit and Innu elders in northern Labrador, and her own elderly relatives on the island of Newfoundland. Her most recent work centre the perceptions of about 200 school children who came for multidisciplinary guided walks in the 6- acre patch of old-growth boreal forest where she has been living and working since 2002 on the island of Newfoundland/ Ktaqmkuk.
Marlene is a Canadian environmental artist living and working on the island of Newfoundland/ Ktaqmkuk. Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally.
She has received many awards, including a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for “Lifetime Artistic Achievement”; the Order of Newfoundland & Labrador, the province’s highest honour; and an Honorary Doctorate (D. Litt.) from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
She says, “Underlying all my work 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 scientifc and vernacular knowledge.”
Marlene acknowledges that she lives and works on the island that is the unceded ancestral homeland of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq peoples. With her work, she strives to create meaningful relationships between people and place, while honouring over 8,000 years of stewardship of the provincial territory by a succession of Indigenous people. www.marlenecreates.ca
Walking and Memory Mapping
Marlene Creates has used memory mapping in her work since 1986—maps drawn both by her and by others for her. Memory maps are examples of alternative maps, also called participatory maps, counter maps, living maps, deep maps, and even radical maps. Every map tells a story and alternative maps tell alternative stories.
Memory Map Drawing Workshop: Site + Memory = Place
Following the talk, Marlene facilitated a memory map drawing workshop in which each participant created a layered memory map of a place that is or has been important to them.