Marlene creates: Land, nature, and the forest as poetry/museum

Abstract

In this article, I intend to scrutinize a Web project by the Canadian poet, land artist, and photographer Marlene Creates: A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden (2010). Her multimedia and multisensory artwork is here viewed as a contribution to the environmental humanities as well as to the eco-digital humanities. Creates's literary and photographic creations-that unravel through a patch of boreal forest in Newfoundland-are certainly among the most original and composite experiments in both digital art and art-en-plain-air, challenging the traditional museum and revealing nature within an ethical and aesthetic discourse of high literary value. The aim of this article is ultimately to assess the variety of media, forms, languages, and stances that The Boreal Poetry Garden project displays to its both real and virtual audiences, also taking into consideration the existing corpus of art and literary criticism on the artist's career (Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard).