Donald Lawrence

Kamloops based artist Donald Lawrence's ambi­tious process-based sculptural and photographic works often combine the creation of elaborate, antiquated methods of outdoor exploration in com­bination with documentation of the ongoing processes the sculptures incite. He has made a canoe that doubles as a darkroom and a sled that converts into a survival tent/hut. Lawrence is fasci­nated with outmoded technologies of exploration and survival, and joins his research into these often nostalgic histories with an active re-mapping of their present day potentials. For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lawrence is constructing a large scale installation based on a number of old iron clad ship's boilers that sit on beaches on the west and east coasts of Canada. Functioning at the cusp between valuable antique and disintegrating flotsam, the boilers pro­vide Lawrence with a trope to examine distinctions between treasure and garbage, memory and lost history.

Biography

Born in Calgary (1963) Donald Lawrence has a BFA from the University of Victoria (1986) and an MFA from York University (1988). He lives in Kamloops where he teaches in the Visual Arts program at Thompson Rivers University. Through such bodies of work as the Beach (1985), Romantic Commodities (1993), The Sled (1995), and The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project (since 1997), Lawrence uses combinations of photography, sculpture, drawing and installation to relate stories of travel, exploration and mechanical invention to a broader interest in the meeting place of urban and wilderness culture and to his more specific, interest in sea kayaking – something which has taken him to Alaska, Maine, and Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Recently, Donald Lawrence has exhibited works in CAMP(sites), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff and Proximities: Artists’ Statements and Their Works, Kamloops Art Gallery. Lawrence received a BFA, University of Victoria (1986) and an MFA, York University (1988).