Viewfinder is a collaborative project between Heather Cline and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Cline has created artwork inspired by viewing the landscape through a conservation lens, walking the land with staff and stakeholders of the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), including Elders, Knowledge Holders, ranchers, and naturalists.¹

Incorporating paintings, audio works and video, Cline has created a multi-media exhibition that offers viewers an immersive experience of the land. The initial fieldwork for Viewfinder consisted of a series of one-on-one encounters with each project participant in their environment. The goal was to have meaningful exchanges on the land that impacted Cline’s renderings of the landscape. Cline documented these walks through audio recordings, video recordings, and an aerial survey of the sites from viewpoint of a Cessna Skyhawk airplane. Key encounters on the ground were marked through the collection of GPS points that were used to create the flight plans over each location. This has translated into a series of paintings of the landscape that capture some of the shared experience on the land with the project’s key participants.² Cline has explained, “I feel a responsibility to honour these people and all they do, to be fair to who they are. I want to shine a light on their expertise as ranchers, hunters, knowledge keepers, scientists, naturalists, and caretakers. I want them to be the starting point for more conversations.”³

These conversations include “talking about food: how it is grown, hunted, harvested, processed and distributed”.⁴ The culmination of paintings, video and audio installations are the result of Cline’s interest and inquiry into the concept of “working landscapes”. Defined as land areas that are used for agriculture, ranching and forestry, these cultivated or industry-based landscapes cover more than 80% of the globe. “As landscapes without human inhabitation and use are already rare and only getting rarer, conservation in working landscapes has become critical to the future of biodiversity.”⁵ A global conservation target has proposed the conservation of 20% of working landscapes as natural, protected areas for habitats suitable and sustainable for native species.⁶

Working with NCC and gaining access to the many land stewards that are part of its Working Landscape Program has allowed Cline to not only recognize the impact of settler history and agricultural practices, where human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, but to create a space that invites viewers to imagine new and better approaches to land use. Naturalist and writer Trevor Herriot suggests that, “Walking through the [gallery] space, if you are paying attention, you will feel something nudging you to get past your first impressions of the land’s surface as a picturesque quilt of blue and yellow fields, and instead lift that comforter and see what else might be there—even if it might be a bit discomforting. Even if we have to face the truth that not everything we do to make the land produce food, fuel, and fibre is good, and that the next thing we must cultivate on the prairie is a widening community of stewardship whose seeds are now sprouting all around us, challenging us to take responsibility for the wellbeing of the prairie that is our shared heritage.”⁷

Jennifer McRorie, curator

1. Heather Cline, Viewfinder, e-published Artist Statement, https://www.heathercline.ca/artwork/viewfinder, accessed September 4, 2026.

2. Ibid.

3. Trevor Herriot, Heather Cline: Viewfinder, e-published essay, https://www.heathercline.ca/artwork/viewfinder, accessed September 4, 2026.

4. Ibid.

5. Wikipedia, Working Landscape, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_landscape, accessed September 4, 2026.

6. Ibid.

7. Trevor Herriot, Heather Cline: Viewfinder, e-published essay, https://www.heathercline.ca/artwork/viewfinder, accessed September 4, 2026.