Karen Miranda Abel is a Canadian environmental artist from Toronto. Abel's atmospheric sculptures and site-sensitive installations are quiet gestures as part of an overarching contemplation of the natural world and geologic deep time, embodying symbolism of the seed, the stone, the river, the reflecting pool, and the cave. Her work generates spaces of quiet reverence in acknowledgment of the intrinsic value, beauty, and complexity of natural phenomena inherent in the water cycle, geomorphology, biodiversity, geodiversity, and night ecology (dark skies).
Guided by elemental form, Abel works with salvaged stone, metal, glass, and windfall—seeds and other plant material that have fallen to the ground—to create sculptures that are brought to life with water collected from streams and waterfalls. Attuned to both the enduring and ephemeral characteristics of water, these works consider the elements of earth and sky and the duality of timelessness and fragility, suggesting landscapes of physical and psychological geographies.
Working within a thematic triad of earth, water, and light, Abel’s works are composed with a considered sense of materiality and realized with these three primordial elements in resonance with fragile ecologies, landscapes, and cultural understandings of place. 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.
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, Art Gallery of Ontario, Harbourfront Centre, and the Ontario Science Centre. She has held artist residencies in Italy (Numeroventi), Australia (BigCi), Chile (La Wayaka Current), Spain (Joya: arte + ecología), Nova Scotia, Canada (Biophilium), and the USA (Vermont Studio Center). Her work is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been recognized with awards from DesignTO, Ontario Science Centre, John B. Aird Gallery, Gladstone House, and the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.
Abel was selected as the 2017-2018 World Heritage Artist in Residence by the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in NSW, Australia, which culminated in her first international solo exhibition, Karen Miranda Abel: Liminal Refugia, at the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery in 2018. Following the exhibition, her 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. Since 2023, she has turned her focus to creating a riverside loft studio space in an 1847 limestone mill in the Waterloo Region west of Toronto for her evolving projects.
Abel holds an interdisciplinary Master in Environmental Studies in Environmental Art Practice, Cultural Production, and Fine Art from York University and formerly worked in ecology, natural heritage, and land conservation in Ontario. Early ecological art projects include biodiversity gardens, including a native plant habitat garden for the endangered monarch butterfly, Migration Garden, at the Ontario Science Centre (Toronto), and a community-engaged tallgrass prairie ecosystem planting, Three Fires Prairie, on Walpole Island, conceived and created in collaboration with the Walpole Island First Nation Heritage Centre, Bkejwanong (“Where the Waters Divide”) Unceded Territory, Walpole Island First Nation, situated on Lake St. Clair in the heart of the Great Lakes.
Photography by Ona Janzen
Karen Miranda Abel gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the following organizations
