Biography

Born in Calgary, Alberta (1963) Donald Lawrence has a BFA from the University of Victoria (1986) and an MFA from York University (1988). He lives in Kamloops where he teaches in the Visual Arts program at Thompson Rivers University. Through such bodies of artwork as The Beach (1985), Romantic Commodities (1993), The Sled (1995), The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project (ongoing, since 1997), and Torhamvan/Ferryland (2005), Lawrence uses combinations of photography, sculpture, drawing and installation to relate stories of travel, exploration and mechanical invention to a broader interest in the meeting place of urban and wilderness culture and to his specific interest in sea kayaking. This is an interest which has taken him to Alaska, Maine, and twice to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides with his folding Klepper kayak.  Donald Lawrence’s recent projects include: participation in Witness Marks: the Exotic Close to Home, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Torhamvan/Ferryland, at Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery"; CAMP(sites)" at Banff’s Walter Phillips Gallery, Proximities: Artists’ Statements and Their Works at the Kamloops Art Gallery and Image and Apparatus at Museum London. Court House , a project Lawrence coordinated, in which the installation of four artists’ projects in Kamloops’ former Law Courts provided the setting for an international academic symposium represents his interest in the meeting place of artistic production and academic inquiry through a number of interdisciplinary research projects; he is currently the lead researcher of a Research/Creation project, through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Lawrence has a BFA (University of Victoria, 1986) and an MFA (York University, 1988).