Diane Borsato

Diane Borsato is an artist and educator who works closely with other artists and amateur naturalists. She has performed and exhibited across Canada and internationally at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, the AGYU, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Walter Philips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Art Centre, Fogo Island Arts, the Creative Time Summit, and at the Toronto Biennial of Art. She has received numerous national research-creation grants and honours, including the Victor Martyn-Lynch Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, and was longlisted for the Sobey Art award in Contemporary Art. Borsato is also Associate Professor in Experimental Studio at the University of Guelph in Canada, where she teaches courses with special topics on art and everyday life including Food, Walking, Live Art, and Outdoor School – exploring live, contemporary environmental art practices. She lives in Toronto.

AGO: Tell us about Cloud Party. 
Borsato: Discarding the official art historical narratives presented at ordinary tours, I guided participants through the Canadian galleries on the second floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario to discuss cloud types, their supplementary features, and other optical environmental phenomena. In the hour-long meteorological tour, participants walked among cumulus clouds, observed rare nacreous and diamond dust, checked out halos and crepuscular rays, discussed tiny rainbows and the shocking lack of rain in the Canadian galleries.  

We discussed meteorological terms in several languages (English common and scientific, Latin, French and Inuktitut), presented a total solar eclipse, and talked about why the sky is blue and full of water - and how we are all in it together. Field guides for cloud identification and the weather were provided for participants.

Performed for the Creative Time Summit - Of Homelands and Revolution at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2017 (photo: E. Moriarty)

AGO: What was the inspiration for this artwork or series?
Borsato: I have always been interested in naturalist strategies for knowing about things in the world – their names, their distinctive identification features, and their relationships with everything else. I practice many of these hobbies, including cloud identification. It struck me that there were many kinds of clouds in paintings in the Canadian collection at the AGO – and looking for them became a way for me to be engaged in looking, differently than by using art historical methods. Once I began to apply these tools deliberately, I found I could undermine some problematic mythologies at play in conventional readings, and could see the works in a historic national collection in new, critical and surprising ways. And I could expand out into looking at abstract painting and sculpture – with fresh references and vocabulary, that multiplied the readings and experience of the works, even the pleasure of the works!

AGO: Tell us about a place or a space where you most love making your work?
Borsato: I love making my works in the world! Anywhere but the office or visual art studio – really – in museums, in the woods, in the company of dancers, in the orchard, the farm, in the apiary… I need a site, a situation, objects and other creatures to respond to.

AGO: Are you in dialogue with any other artists or creative peers about your practice? If so, how does this dialogue feed your work?
Borsato: I am in dialogue with artists, students, designers, dancers; and non-arts practitioners of all kinds – like mycologists, orchardists, astronomers, flower arrangers, farmers, chefs, horticulturalists, and activists. These conversations across disciplines are very important to my work – to feed my research, and to create relationships that carry into collaborations and participation.

Follow Diane @dianeborsato, who was also in residence at the AGO in the fall of 2013.

Learn more about Borsato's arts practice, nature, and using the tools of a naturalist to make sense of things in museums, in her conversation with AGO curator Georgiana Uhlyarik below: