Laura Millard’s exhibition trace, on view at the Visual Arts Centre’s McClure Gallery, engages with the language of drawing and gesture in relation to the landscape while questioning the traces our actions leave behind.

Millard’s process begins with drawings that she views as performances in the landscape. She photographs these from far overhead with a drone, and then uses paint and drawing materials to work into the print, adding marks made by the hand to those captured in the image. Selected images are printed onto fabric to use in lightboxes scaled to the height of the viewer. The lightboxes envelop the viewer, casting light and the reflected image into the space. These immersive experiences of place visualize precarious landscapes on the verge of radical change.

Millard has made her line drawings in remote and familiar places, from using a recovered fishing net and rope in Svalbard, Norway, to using snowmobiles and ice skates in northern Canadian locales. The ephemeral nature of these drawings done on ice, sand and snow points to the impermanent nature of our time in these places and the hubris of ‘leaving our mark’.