Jennifer Globush

Based in northwestern Ontario, Jennifer Globush has spent most of her life amongst landscapes of industrial gold mining within the boreal forests of Canada. She comes from a long line of underground miners and spent her teenage years working hard labour jobs in a gold mine. This experience instilled a connection to and enormous respect for dangerous labour jobs at a young age.

Jennifer makes large-scale detailed portrait drawings on paper executed through laborious draftsman style layers of charcoal, ink and graphite. The drawings are a recontextualisation of photographs taken by Jennifer of individuals who reside in remote northern communities.

Her series, “Fire Line,” which she’s created over the past two years, is a series of larger than life-sized charcoal and graphite portraits, examining the men and women dedicating their lives to fighting forest fires within the vast boreal regions of northern Ontario. An often dangerous and unseen occupation, the renderings are an attempt to recognise the labour and sacrifice of those keeping the forests, wildlife and dispersed northern residents safe from disaster. In these portraits, the subjects are no longer concealed within the trees but instead are revealed to be the faces of our front line, the silent rangers of our security.

Fire Line is an extension of Globush’s ongoing visual documentation of life in the north, recognising the unknown hard labour posts it demands and the people that make the wild northern environment truly unique.