ARTIST STATEMENT

Elaine Whittaker is a Canadian visual artist working at the intersection of art, science, medicine, and ecology. She has created artworks for over twenty-five years about Climate Change, epidemics and pandemics as our environment becomes even more fragile in this time of emerging, and re-emerging, contagions. The artworks reflect on narratives of hope and elements of anxiety as found in popular culture, scientific research, and personal experience. More recently her artworks reference climate and planetary changes through the lens of utopian and dystopian speculative and science fiction. Whittaker creates mixed media installations, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, drawings, videos, and digital images and incorporates traditional and unconventional materials –- paint, pigment, wax, clay, textiles, repurposed fibres, and mosquitoes, salt crystals, human/animal cells, and live microorganisms.