Valerie Durant
Kinship & Continuum: The Hidden Connections
painPRO NeuroARTS Project
Coal Harbour, 535 Thurlow Street, Vancouver, B.C.
Opening September 27 2026 5:30pm - 8 pm
Kinship & Continuum: The Hidden Connections explores the reciprocal relationship between human experience and the natural world. Expanding upon work developed across several series in photography, sculpture, textiles and installation,Durant considers transformation, reflection and permeability across water, ice, forest and organic forms, revealing connections between ecological cycles and fundamental human experiences. Rather than positioning ourselves apart from nature, the works consider us as participants within an interconnected continuum shaped by change, resilience and regeneration.
Grounded in a daily practice of observation and immersion in the natural world, Durant’s photographs trace relationships across seemingly disparate landscapes. Arctic icebergs, ocean horizons, shifting reflections, submerged forms and entangled forest networks move between surface and depth, permanence and impermanence, the visible and unseen. Water reflects and distorts, ice dissolves, organic matter decomposes and regenerates, while branching forms reveal networks extending beyond what can be seen.
Across these works, recurring patterns and processes suggest connections between ecological systems, our bodies and lived experience. Boundaries become permeable: reflections merge with their surroundings, forms emerge and recede, and states of transformation reveal nature not as fixed, but as a continuous process of adaptation and renewal.
The exhibition considers how sensory and embodied encounters with art in a healthcare environment can support mental and physical wellbeing, shape perception, and deepen our relationship with the world around us.
Presented through the painPRO NeuroARTS Project, the exhibition invites sensory attention, contemplation and an awareness of our reciprocal relationship with the environments we inhabit. Kinship & Continuum considers human experience as part of an enduring ecological continuum—one in which interdependence, vulnerability, resilience and regeneration connect us to the larger living systems of which we are a part.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valeriedurant.art/
(604)780-8998
Valerie & Her Connection to Neuroarts
Valerie Durant (BFA, MA) is a Vancouver based artist, whose conceptual practice melds photography with sculptural materials, sound, video, and installation. She treats space as active material. Her interconnected photographic works weave architectural and spatial relationships with material, body, and space. Her work is rooted in her contemplative nature walks, where Durant engages with sensorial dialogue between the natural world and primal human experience—such as life, death, and consciousness.Durant uses alternative photographic processes, sculptural experimentation, and spatial installation to engage with our interdependent and regenerative world. Her work is held in public and private collections locally and internationally.
Durant’s relationship to neuroarts is rooted in a career that has consistently brought together design, health, environment, and human experience. She began her professional life designing healthcare interiors after graduating from Langara College’s Design Formation Diploma Program. Working on medical and dental environments as both designer and project manager, she considered health, wellbeing, and client comfort fundamental to the spaces she created. Sustainability within the built environment became an increasingly important aspect of the projects she led and helped shape the direction of her subsequent work.
While raising a family, Durant completed a BFA at Emily Carr University. She later travelled with her husband, Brian, to South Africa, where she undertook consulting projects that included policy development for the African Water Institute and developing a Climate Action Plan to reduce Ghg Emmissions for the UK Government. Her experiences there deepened her awareness of the unequal impacts of environmental degradation and climate change, particularly on communities that have contributed least to their causes.
Returning to university, Durant completed an MA in Community and Regional Planning in the School of the Built Environment. Her dissertation, Sustainable Urban Agriculture: The Edible Connected City, examined the intersections of global food security, climate change, the urban heat island effect, and the design of resilient cities. She subsequently worked to develop Housing Policy as a Planner for the City of Vancouver and later as a private consultant, leading Federal accelerated infrastructure projects for Canadian airports and Canada Border Services Agency locations.
Durant eventually returned her focus to artmaking, bringing these seemingly distinct strands of her life together. Her understanding of architecture and space, healthcare and wellbeing, ecology, climate, sensory experience, and social vulnerability now informs an artistic practice concerned with the relationship between human and environmental health.
Within neuroarts, Durant is particularly interested in how encounters with art, sensory experience, and the natural world can affect how we feel, perceive, reflect, and connect. Through photography, textiles, sculpture, sound, vibration, and installation, she creates environments intended to be experienced not only visually, but spatially and through the body. Her work explores interdependence, regeneration, resilience, and our reciprocal relationship with the natural world.
In this sense, her current practice brings her career full circle: from designing healthcare environments for comfort and wellbeing to exploring how art itself might contribute to experiences of restoration, connection, and wellbeing. Her work asks how healing our relationship with the natural world—and experiencing that relationship through art—might also contribute to healing ourselves.