Anyone who has lived near a river knows how a waterway can affect your daily routine, your sense of space, and your relationship with nature. Lyndal Osborne's exhibition Rivers at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery brings together two rivers that hold meaning for her: the Shoalhaven River in Australia (where Osborne grew up) and the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton where she has lived since the 1970s. The large installation features an impressive amount of natural material collected from each place and arranged into the form of a flowing, bubbling river.
Lyndal Osborne, Rivers, mixed media
The first thing to catch my eye is the light sparkling off thousands of glass mason jars, creating the illusion of fluidity. Among the jars are clusters of bowls, each filled with different materials. The bowls on the Shoalhaven River side are painted fiery red and contain items taken from the banks of the Australian river: lotus pods, bull kelp, urchins, fuzzy seed balls. One bowl contains dozens of dried cicada carcasses. On the Edmonton side, pea green bowls contain pieces of wood, shells, bones, seeds, a nest, agricultural tools, golf balls, and other things collected by Osborne on daily walks along the riverbank.
The manner in which Osborne presents these items has the air of a ritualistic offering, and speaks to conceptual underpinnings in her work. She is interested in the way things are collected, classified, and displayed. In other projects she has explored connections the curiosity cabinet and the seed bank. Her knowledge of flora and fauna does not come from a formal or scientific understanding of botany, but from a deep connection with her environment and a desire to learn more about its composition. This installation demonstrates her interest in the diversity, complexity and abundance of nature, which are all being threatened by climate change in general, and more specifically, by tar sands development and suburban expansion surrounding her home in Edmonton.
Rivers is an immersive, sensual landscape that demonstrates intimate ties between nature and culture, urban and rural space, and between oneself and the earth, the trees, the seeds, and even the detritus that litters the riverbank. The installation is a remarkable tribute to the complexity of riparian ecosystems and to the intimate bonds that can form between humans and their natural environments.
University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery: http://umanitoba.ca/schools/art/lyndal_osborne.html
Lyndal Osborne: Rivers continues until August 23.
Noni Brynjolson is a writer and curator from Winnipeg whose work has been published in journals, exhibition catalogues, blogs, and zines. She is a recent graduate of the Master's program in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal and currently works as the Distribution Coordinator at the Winnipeg Film Group. She is Akimblog's Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed @NoniBrynjolson on Twitter.
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Lyndal Osborne at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery
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