DIANE BURKO

CREATIVE STATEMENT

My practice, at the intersection of art, science, and the environment, is fueled by my concern about climate change. I endeavour to bring this crucial issue to light through images rather than words. Rather than being apocalyptical, I want my images to bring beauty into the conversation, to remind us all of the magic of the natural world. I endeavor to accomplish this by combining compelling images with visual prompts.

I like to call myself a ‘subversive’ artist. But that is not where I began my career last century. I began as a landscape painter, enthralled with nature and vast geological phenomena. It was only about 20 years ago that my attention shifted and I started to focus on the ways in which our planet is being threatened by its inhabitants and began to develop new visual strategies in an effort to contribute to being part of the solution. These three works form part of this development. Grinnell Mt. Gould Quadtych focuses on the gradual disappearance of Grinnell Glacier in Montana. Summer Heat deals with rising global temperatures, incorporating climate data from the NOAA against an urgent backdrop of raging wildfires in Australia. And Unprecedented, the most recent work here, is an abstract meditation on the past, present, and future of the COVID-19 pandemic globally.

BIOGRAPHY

Diane Burko’s work in painting, photography, and time-based media considers the marks that human conversations make on the landscape. After focusing for several decades on monumental geological formations and waterways through landscape painting, Burko has shifted in the past 20 years to analyze the impact of industrial and colonial activity on those same landscapes. Burko’s practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects – extraction, deforestation, extinction, environmental justice, indigenous genocide, ecological degradation, climate collapse – so viewers might feel their connection viscerally; so that the connection becomes impossible to ignore. While her work deals with impending climate catastrophe, rather than lingering in dystopia, it celebrates the sublimity of the landscape by honoring the intricate geological and political webs that shape the identity of a place.

Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and especially cherishes her collaborations with researchers in the sciences. She learns the most from ‘bearing witness’ to the land.