Faculty of Art

Printmaking & Publications

Alexandra Tremblay

Misled Lands

This piece is called Misled Lands; this is a response to Gertrude Eleanor Spurr Cutts' A Surrey Heath,1898. For this response, I wanted to explore the topic of land and create a narrative of the effect of colonialism in Canada.

“This piece exhibits two images; one is of Cutts' A Surrey Heath, and the other is the deforestation of the boreal forests in Canada. Although the only ties between the two images are the landscapes, they convey a similar narrative of colonization. Cutts' depiction of the landscape is a romanticized view of settler's lands, displaying a mother with her two children playing in the field. In contrast, the second image is a statement of how colonization genuinely affects the land. In displaying these two images in white ink, the images become almost negative in space, creating a sort of erasure in the information presented.”