| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Author, conservationist, and investigative artist Maureen Enns achieved international acclaim for her controversial ecological work to protect grizzlies and Alberta’s wild horses. Inspiration for her charcoals, bold paintings, mixed media works, as well as her books, arise from her research into and experiences of nature, especially in isolated eastern Russia among grizzly bears.
Born in Chilliwack, B.C., Enns spent her childhood exploring the wilderness, riding horses, and developing an affinity for animals. After completing her B.Ed. at the University of British Columbia (1969), a course in Art History sent her travelling to Europe and Australia (where she briefly ran an art school), before she pursued her M.F.A. at the University of Calgary (1971).
Enns’s art propelled her into lengthy periods of remote fieldwork for connection with animals and nature, in particular in the boreal forest/marshlands near the Stoney Nakoda Nation, home to wild horses since the 1920s.
A 2006 horse ride into remote northern Argentina brought her to a hidden cave alive with 15th and 16th Century Inca pictographs, which reminded her of the few wild horses remaining in Alberta’s Ghost Forest. Enns later said, “very few things of cultural and historical value are treasured until they have long disappeared [such as] Inca Civilization and… likely… the wild horses of the Ghost Forest.” Another journey brought her to Nepal’s upper Langtang mountains in 2010 to encounter Buddhist prayer flags, prompting Enns to create her own digital paintings of prayer flags spider-webbed across the Canadian Rockies.
Enns has served an artist residency at the Canberra School of Art and teaches the Alberta College of Art + Design. She’s the first Canadian to mount a solo exhibition at the Moscow Contemporary Art Centre; other exhibitions have gone to Australia, France, and Slovenia. Her books include Grizzly Heart, Grizzly Seasons, and she was part of the documentaries Walking With Giants and Wild Horses of the Canadian Rockies. Numerous collections hold her work, and she is the recipient of over 30 regional and national art grants and close to a million dollars of sponsorship assistance for her research. |