Abstract

This thesis explores how the works of Eleanor Bond, Brenda Pelkey and Janet Cardiff emphasize the inseparability of represented space from human perception, and the crucial role played by such physical and cultural concerns as the body, memories, stories and dreams in the shaping of spaces. Their works refer, therefore, not simply to physical spaces, but to conditions or states of space, often determined by layers of metaphorical significance which these artists bring to light. It is these ephemeral transformations and psychic interventions which irrevocably alter our environments that constitute the scape, a concept which captures this building up of a network of human responses to one's environment which in turn change the way it is perceived and lived. In their insistence upon the impact of the elusive and metaphorical, these works constitute a decided intervention in the tradition of Canadian landscape art while remaining firmly embedded in discussions of space, situation and environment. By subverting hegemonic modes of spatial representation, Bond, Pelkey and Cardiff construct their own visual assertions of what spaces were, can, or could be. The creation of scapes becomes part of a process for re-shaping both perceived and lived space, collapsing binaries such as self and other, public and private, nature and culture, and reality and fiction, in order to encompass the range of concrete and metaphorical attempts to shape the spaces we inhabit.