Viewfinder

‘Viewfinder’ is a collaborative project between Heather Cline and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Cline created artwork inspired by viewing the landscape through a conservation lens, walking the land with staff and stakeholders of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Cline has created a multi-media exhibition incorporating paintings, audio works and video that offer an immersive experience of the land. The initial fieldwork for ‘Viewfinder’ consisted of a series of one-on-one encounters with each project participant in their environment. The goal was to have meaningful exchanges on the land that impacted Cline’s renderings of the landscape. Cline documented these walks through audio recordings, video recordings and an aerial survey of the sites from viewpoint of a Cessna Skyhawk airplane. Key encounters on the ground were marked through the collection of GPS points that were used to create the flight plans over each location. This has translated into a series of paintings of the landscape that capture some of the shared experience on the land with the project’s key participants. The exhibition also features video documentation of participants walking through the different project sites and an archive of short explanatory videos featuring the activities of project participants on the land.

Heather Cline is a professional visual artist based in Saskatchewan. Cline has a deep interest in public interaction and has participated in residency programs and community engagement across Canada. Her activities have included setting up a ‘Story Collection’ office from an inner-city store front in Oshawa, Ontario and riding along on combines in rural Manitoba. In her most recent art work she is exploring the radically altered terrain of Western Canada in a series of aerial landscape paintings based on observations from the passenger seat of a Cessna Skyhawk. In the spring of 2023 Cline is started a major collaborative project with the Nature Conservancy of Canada. The goal of this work is to explore Western Canadian landscape through a conservation lens.

Cline has her MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and has exhibited in multiple group exhibitions, with solo exhibitions throughout Canada. Her work is in public and private collections across North America and Europe, including the Colart Collection, the Mendel Collection at the Remai Modern, the Dunlop Art Gallery, the Saskatchewan Legislature, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and Global Affairs Canada.