Janet Cardiff
Forest Walk

Janet Cardiff, Forest Walk (1991), image Don Lee, The Banff Centre

While participating in a creative residency at the Banff Centre in 1991, artist Janet Cardiff developed a unique approach that has since become one of her signature styles. On a walk through a nearby cemetery, Cardiff’s tape recorder accidentally rewound. When replayed, the effect of hearing the sound of her own voice combined with the ambient noise of the natural environment and her own footsteps was both haunting and thought-provoking.

Cardiff’s audio walks guide participants on a journey combining their own experience of the physical environment with the additional sounds and voices recorded on a CD. The artist provides directions and tells stories creating a complex sensory encounter that challenge the participants’ sense of space and time. Are the sounds and activities the participants sense really happening, or are they a fictional construct?

Cardiff’s work has been received with critical acclaim around the world and the artist has subsequently been commissioned to produce new work in England, Germany, Italy, and Austria, among other countries. Cardiff’s use of audio in her artwork has since developed to include sculpture and film through collaborative projects with her husband, George Bures Miller. In 2001, she was awarded the Millennium Prize from the National Gallery of Canada for the work Forty-Part Motet and with Bures Miller became the first Canadians to win the La Biennale di Venezia Special Award at the Venice Biennale for The Paradise Institute.

To experience Forest Walk, the first of Cardiff’s ground-breaking walks, please speak with the gallery assistant at the Walter Phillips Gallery during open hours from June 1 to September 31.