Artist Q & A: Mel Gausden
In this new artist Q & A, Mel Gausden discusses her exploration of memory, ecology, and impermanence within her new solo exhibition Future Museums II, and contemplates the role of art in both human connectivity and the recording of existing spaces.
Future Museums II opens on Saturday, October 4 in Bau-Xi Vancouver's Upper Gallery and runs through October 16, 2025.
1. Future Museums II builds upon your 2024 solo exhibition at Bau-Xi Toronto. How has the work evolved between these two chapters? Are there new undercurrents that emerged as the series progressed?
I like to think that the work is always evolving, even from the first painting to the last painting in a singular body of work. Future Museums started out as a way to step back from the precipice of climate change anxiety. It was almost an exercise in re-finding joy within the natural world. I find that over time creating art about the landscape and environmentalism becomes interwoven with climate anxiety. But there need to be reminders as to why it’s so important to forge on and continue to hope and to share instead of giving in to those feelings. With the continuance of Future Museums II the paintings have become more cinematic and layered. I became more interested in the abstracted shapes within the landscape and letting some of the tangled feelings about climate change dictate the atmosphere in the paintings.
I first began feeling drawn to the landscapes of the West Coast during visits dotted over many years. I always had a curiosity surrounding the coastal rainforest. Coming from Ontario, I was struck by the scale and density of the landscape. The ocean, forest, and rock all press up against each other in dramatic proximity. That intensity of atmosphere, the damp air, shifting light, and sense of vastness, made a deep impression and has become a place that I am consistently drawn back to.
Much of my work is rooted in particular landscapes that I return to again and again, both in life and in memory. The rainforest trails north of Ucluelet, the flowing waters of Stamp River, and the rugged shoreline stretching between Sooke and Port Renfrew have all left lasting impressions. These places aren’t just settings, they are layered with lived experience, encounters, and moments that deepen their presence in my work.
Mel Gausden, What Remains. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches
One such moment happened on a beach near East Sooke, where I was visiting friends during a difficult period in their lives. As we sat around a campfire, one of them came back from the water carrying his young son. He was soaked up to the knees. He had dipped the boy’s toes into the ocean for the very first time, wanting to share that elemental meeting. It was a profoundly tender gesture, one that fused the physical place with an enduring emotional resonance.
I think of these experiences as anchors within the larger trajectory of my practice. Just as my paintings fracture and layer the landscape into shifting planes of colour and texture, these memories hold complexity: joy, vulnerability, impermanence, loss and transformation. The works born from these places are not only records of the land but also reflections on the fragile intersections of environment, memory, and human connection.
Mel Gausden, left: Sketch for the Weight of Green. Watercolour and pencil on paper, 8 x 8 inches. Right: The Weight of Green. Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
3. Your process moves beautifully from watercolour studies to layered abstractions. Does this progression reflect your experience of memory and loss/transformation in the landscapes you depict?
I’m always trying to capture the immediacy and emotion of a place. My watercolour studies often begin as direct, fleeting impressions, the same way a memory first arrives; clear, but delicate and impermanent. When I start to layer into a larger painting I’m not only building on those impressions, but also trying to acknowledge how time and change reshape our connection to the place. For me, the layering is a way of holding onto both presence and absence. The forests, rivers and oceans I depict are rooted in personal experience, yet they have already shifted, sometimes even disappeared. The larger works allow me to reflect that dissonance; the importance of these places, the beauty and refuge they offer, alongside the knowledge that they’re vulnerable to transformation.
Mel Gausden, Study for Stranded. Oil on oil paper, 22 x 30 inches
4. The soft light of dawn and dusk recurs in your work. What draws you to these liminal hours, and how do they help convey the emotional atmosphere of the collection?
The light of dawn and dusk feels like a natural extension of the way I approach memory in landscape. These hours carry a sense of stillness and transition; moments where the world is shifting yet briefly suspended. I’m drawn to them because they echo the way memory itself works - fragile, fleeting, and carrying feelings of both calmness and unease. In this collection, that soft, mutable light helps to create an atmosphere of reflection. It blurs edges, softens forms, and allows me to layer abstraction with a kind of emotional resonance. Much like the landscapes I return to in my work, places marked by both personal attachment and ecological change; dawn and dusk hold the tension between presence and loss, continuity and impermanence.
5. Your work evokes both personal memory and collective experience. How do you think that duality influences the way people interpret and connect with your paintings?
Personal experience sits inside broader histories, just as an individual landscape exists within larger ecological and cultural narratives. When I paint, I often begin from something intimate: a hike, a campfire, a fleeting moment with friends or family. But as the work develops, it expands outward, touching on more universal questions. I think that duality invites viewers to find their own entry point. Some might connect with the emotional texture of a remembered place, while others may see echoes of their own landscapes and histories. The paintings hold space for both: they carry my memories, but they also open into something shared. That tension between the personal and the collective shapes how people interpret the work, allowing it to resonate across different experiences while still remaining rooted in my own.
At our core, I think we’re all searching for connection; for someone else to share the experience of life with, so that we don’t feel alone. I like to believe that this is part of why people are drawn to my work. It can be difficult to put into words those fleeting moments without sounding reductive. But art has a way of holding those feelings directly, without explanation. A painting can carry that atmosphere so clearly that viewers recognize it instantly; finding echoes of their own experiences within mine. Even though each of us arrives with different memories, the emotional resonance is shared.
Mel Gausden, Between Shadows. Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches
6. "Future Museums" hints at an imagined space where natural beauty is preserved only in image. Do you see your paintings as a form of visual record-keeping, particularly in our current sobering times?
Yes, I do think of the paintings as a form of record-keeping, though not in a purely documentary sense. Future Museums emerged from my awareness that many of the landscapes I return to in my work are already changing, and in some cases disappearing. Painting them becomes a way of holding onto their presence, both as I experienced them and as they exist in memory.
At the same time, I don’t see them as static records. The way I fracture and layer the landscape reflects how memory works; fluid, emotional, and always transforming. In that sense, the paintings are less about preserving a fixed image of nature and more about acknowledging its impermanence, while still insisting on its importance in being.
