Karen Miranda Abel is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist from Toronto. Abel’s durational field studies and site-sensitive elemental installations reflect on timelessness and the intrinsic values of natural phenomena. Light and space are collaborators in a research-based slow art practice in which she ultimately realizes her works as conceptual gardens cultivated in time and place. Her evolving atmospheric works and reflecting pools are quiet gestures as part of an overarching non-anthropocentric contemplation of the natural world and geologic deep time. Experiential and reciprocal research methods conducted with ethical sensitivity toward fragile ecologies, landscapes, and cultural understandings of place are central to her practice. Working within a thematic triad: earth, water, and light, Abel’s works are composed with a considered sense of materiality and realized with these three primordial elements. Describing her art practice as conceptual gardening, Abel works in elemental form with water, earth and minerals, plant life, stone, glass, and metal.
Abel's work has been featured in Canadian Art and she has exhibited internationally and at Canadian galleries and major cultural institutions including Varley Art Gallery, Karsh-Masson Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Harbourfront Centre, and the Ontario Science Centre. She has held artist residencies in Italy, Australia, Chile, Spain, Nova Scotia (Canada), and the USA. Abel's work is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been recognized by awards from DesignTO, the Ontario Science Centre, John B. Aird Gallery, Gladstone House, and the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Abel was selected as the 2017-2018 Blue Mountains Cultural Centre World Heritage Artist in Residence in Australia which culminated in her first international solo exhibition, Karen Miranda Abel: Liminal Refugia, at the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, Australia, in 2018. Following the exhibition, Abel’s site-specific work Veil of Time was acquired by the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre for the museum’s permanent art collection. In 2019, she received the DesignTO Best in Festival Award: New Work for the installation Desert Pools (Atacama) exhibited at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre for DesignTO’s annual exhibition. In 2022, Abel realized Light Garden, a site-specific solo exhibition of work conceived for the courtyard of Numeroventi in the 16th century Palazzo Galli Tassi in Florence, Italy.
Abel holds an interdisciplinary Master in Environmental Studies in Environmental Art Practice, Cultural Production, and Fine Art from York University. Early works include ecological installations and biodiversity gardens, including a monarch butterfly habitat garden, Migration Garden, at the Ontario Science Centre, and a community-engaged tallgrass prairie ecosystem planting, Three Fires Prairie, created on Walpole Island in collaboration with the Walpole Island Heritage Centre, Walpole Island First Nation, Bkejwanong (“Where the Waters Divide”) Unceded Territory, situated on Lake St. Clair in the heart of the Great Lakes. A naturalist and environmentalist, Abel has also worked professionally in ecology, natural heritage, and land conservation in Ontario.
Photography by Ona Janzen
Karen Miranda Abel gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the following organizations
