On March 7, local artist Sarah Crawley unveiled her latest exhibition, as the wind blew: the ground beneath me / at the water’s edge / in its path, in downtown Winnipeg. The opening ceremony was followed by an artist talk and demonstration the next day. Until April 17, Martha Street Studio will house photographic and video art that Crawley created in response to her mother’s passing in 2017.

Crawley graduated from U of M’s school of art in 1994. She first experimented with photography in the 80s and continued using analog photographic techniques even after digital cameras became widespread. Her art is deeply personal, often reflecting her lived experience and ritualistic behaviour.

For her exhibition, Crawley said she was inspired by her mother’s increasing vulnerability as she aged and sought to reflect that in her work by putting herself in a similarly vulnerable position.

“I lay in the woods with pinhole cameras up in the trees — pinhole cameras that I’d built — up in the trees pointing down at me. And I lay there for 45 minutes at a time, each time I did this, and it was very uncomfortable, and I did feel very vulnerable doing it,” said Crawley. “There’s lots of room for accidental things to happen, but it was a very powerful experience, and I continued to do that kind of ritual for about a year.”

Unfortunately, her mother passed away that year. Over the course of two years, Crawley returned to the same spot at Clear Lake to photograph the lakeshore with her pinhole camera, sometimes plunging into the freezing water. She also visited the south basin of Lake Winnipeg eight times in 2020 to create over 200 lumen prints.

“[Lake Winnipeg] was very important because that’s where I spent time as a child with my family at that shoreline, and so that was really again rituals around healing and mourning and honouring my mom. She was an artist as well,” Crawley said. “My mom and I were very close, and we shared a lot of things, like a love of nature and a love of water and a love of art.”

Crawley’s love for nature has deepened while working on this exhibition. She is currently working on sustainable photographic techniques, such as using plant-based materials to develop film and reducing the use of chemicals and water in her creative process.

“One of the things I’m really interested in right now, moving forward, is reducing the amount of chemical or commercial chemistry that I’m using with my photography practice. It’s one of the ways that I’m trying to honour water,” she said.

“In the body of work that is being shown at Martha Street, so much of it is about water, and my relationship not only with water, but with nature, but very much so how water has helped me heal. And so, there’s like a reciprocal relationship that I feel with water, where I want to try to keep it healthy as well.”

Visit printmakers.mb.ca/as-the-wind-blew-the-ground-beneath-me-at-the-waters-edge-in-its-path-sarah-crawley for more information on the exhibition.