Public Art: Sustainable Sculpture and Street Meet

Submitted by: Amanda Bosiak, Member Services

People attending the Cathedral Village Arts Festival in Regina last month might have noticed some strange and wonderful installations hugging otherwise normal trees on 13th Avenue.

Sustainable Sculpture Installation in Regina, May 2013

This riot of fabric and colour was a project for the Sustainable Approaches to 3-Dimensional Form at the University of Regina. The class (Sustainable Sculpture for short) is taught by artist Tamara Rusnak, who also received her Masters in Fine Art at the U of R in 2010.

Rusnak is a painter and sculpture, and a staunch believer in being mindful of the products we use on a daily basis. While working on her undergraduate degree in painting at UBC, she realized that while many artists are inspired by the natural world, they tend to use manufactured products to create their works of art. She was no exception to that, and in becoming more conscious of her own consumer consumption in her practice, began to find ways to reduce her environmental imprint as an artist. This led to the use of salvaged materials in the place of canvas, and creating her own paint with natural pigments derived from plants and minerals. Rusnak says, "There's a real pleasure in knowing where your materials come from."