UPCOMING! Ecologies – Eveline Kolijn

Exhibition Details

Stimulated by her study of natural science as a creative force, Calgary-based artist and author Eveline Kolijn marries science with art; generating through printmaking, video and installation, a fantastical vision of our natural world.

“The sea permeated my upbringing. I spent my childhood in the 1970s beachcombing along the shores of Venezuela and my teens on the Caribbean island of Curaçao with a lot of scuba diving and snorkeling.”

This lived experience shapes how the Eveline Kolijn views the world: especially the oceans—the ‘lungs’ that sustain life on the planet.

As amateur field naturalists, her family collected and identified seashells in the Caribbean on holidays. Her father, D.L.N. Vink, as an employee of Dutch Shell, an international oil company, started writing to malacologists for information on the shells they found. This contact established for the young Eveline the habit of engagement with the scientific community which carries on in her own work today. She remembers as a teenager knowing hundreds of Latin names of shells by heart: writing little numbers on the shells with India ink and a pen to help with the cataloguing. Later in the 90’s, her father donated 4000 shells to Naturalis, the Museum of Natural History (now Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Leiden, Netherlands).

A bilingual artist of Dutch ancestry with only an educational connection to the Netherlands, Eveline Kolijn is a cultural outlier. She is also an outlier in contemporary Canadian art with her environmental subject matter. As she explains, her art is positioned at “the intersection of art and science with a focus on (marine) biology, ecosystems, evolution and climate change.”

A skilled and imaginative printmaker with imagery often addressing the issue of coral reef decline, Kolijn excels at lino and woodcut to describe undersea life with detail, pattern and formal design. Having left Curaçao in 1978, she returned in 1995 to visit her parents, now retired on the island. Here she made the shocking discovery that the coral reef was in decline. “The sea urchins had disappeared, and the hallmark forests of elkhorn coral as well.” She notes that in the 30 years she has been returning, the coral reefs have continued to deteriorate.

Kolijn is self-educated in the discipline of marine biology. Her post-secondary education consists of an MA Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University (Netherlands) in 1986. Although making art has had a consistent presence in her life since childhood, her formal study began as a mature student at the Alberta College of Art & Design (Alberta University of the Arts) where in 2008 she earned a BFA and the Governor General’s Award for academic achievement. In 2019 she received an Alberta University of the Arts Alumni Legacy Award.

Curated by Mary Beth Laviolette

An opening reception will be held October 2, 5:00-8:00pm.  Details and RSVP info to follow.