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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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Thicket & gardens of forking paths (2017)

Thicket & gardens of forking paths (2017)

Every garden is a replica, a representation, an attempt to recapture something…

Thicket, the exhibition comprises three haptic garden spaces created in the gallery; cleave…a path in the wilderness, a room sized installation of 12,000 beeswax leaves hangs on the wall like a tapestry flowing and carpeting the floor; gardens of forking paths an intimate video looped projection, a collection of photographs and a series of beeswax cast sculptures, expanding the visual field while creating a reciprocal conversation between image and object; and thicket, a column, a mass, a reference to both the mimesis of nature and culture, to the ruin and the architectural folly.

All three suggest a narrative, an odd collision of loss, separation, struggle, refuge, beauty and desire. They are not a complete mapping of each other but rather they are imaginary built landscapes, sensorial encounters and suggest the symbolic cycles of life and death.

Photograph credits Darin White at Wilfred Laurier University

Curator of Thicket, Suzanne Luke at Robert Langen Gallery, Wilfred Laurier University