This summer, Walter Phillips Gallery presents the exhibition A Clean Place to Swim by Diane Borsato, featuring new and past works exploring the liberating, intimate, and communal possibilities of being in water. A frequent Banff Centre collaborator, we asked her about the impact of the landscape on her work.
What do you find inspiring about creating art that’s in conversation with the outdoors?
As an artist, I’ve always found natural spaces to be infinitely more stimulating than an empty white studio. Underneath the sensory experience of a mountain—or even a single mushroom—there are deep histories and possibilities for meaning.
“[Banff Centre is] a landscape as full of artists as it is with birds.”
Diane Borsato
You have a long history with Banff Centre. What continues to excite you about the landscape here?
My favourite part of the landscape are the smaller-scale encounters: bunches of witch’s hair lichen growing from the trees, or pairs of enormous elk lounging on the trails. And those mischievous long-tailed black and iridescent blue magpies are so beautiful—every time, they surprise me.
I also love the landscape of human encounters I have here—with artists, playwrights, dancers, musicians, designers, performers, and more—that have been so important to the development of my work, and to expanding my friendships around the world. It’s a landscape as full of artists as it is with birds.
Do you have any favourite spots on campus?
I love to swim, and so my favourite spot on campus is the Sally Borden Fitness and Recreation pool. By day, you are surrounded by a view of those impossible mountains and then at night, you can float around under an uncanny, overhead view of the pool itself, reflected in the glass ceiling. I also love the glacier-cold Bow River, which I swam in during the hottest of summers, at our Outdoor School residency, in 2018. It’s meant to be an annual prompt inviting artists and researchers to swim together in the Bow. This year, the swimming date falls on Thursday, August 6 from 6 to 7 p.m. If you’re feeling up to brave the cold, you can show up and make it happen!
Outdoor School—the residency and resulting book— explored contemporary environmental art in Canada.
How can lovers of the outdoors start to think like artists during their own outdoor activities? For [co-faculty Amish Morrell] and I, the focus of our
Outdoor School project is to draw attention to the ways artists think, learn, and respond to the outdoors. It’s an ongoing proposal to practice being outdoors, whether it is by walking, swimming, foraging, mountain climbing, visioning, spell-conjuring, rabbit-hunting, trespassing, or even pumpkin-boat sailing—with humility, attention, and openness to new ways of thinking. Being together outdoors helps us to ask: What do we owe all the other beings we share the world with? And what do we owe ourselves?