Kavanagh, Mary
Faculty (On Leave)
- Phone
- (403) 329-2160
- Fax
- (403) 382-7127
- mary.kavanagh@uleth.ca
Office Hours
About Me
Board of Governors Research Chair, Tier I in Fine Arts
Member, Royal Canadian Academy of Art
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Arts and Humanities
Biography
Mary Kavanagh is a Canadian visual artist and Professor of Art at the University of Lethbridge, where she has taught since 2000. For three decades, she has undertaken projects through fieldwork, residencies, archival research, and interdisciplinary collaboration, often engaging remote and restricted sites. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally.
Working across photography, moving image, drawing, and installation, Kavanagh investigates sites shaped by nuclear colonialism, militarization, and industrial extraction. Her practice engages collecting, memory, inscription, and visibility, approaching the archive as material evidence bound to histories and territories. This research is articulated through formally restrained, spatial, and sensory works that respond to conceptual, political, and felt imperatives.
Critical writing on Kavanagh’s work has been published in art publications and scholarly journals including Esse, Arena, Ciel variable, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and Canadian Military History. Her work is also discussed in books and exhibition catalogues including War Art in Canada: A Critical History (2021), Through Post-Atomic Eyes (2020), The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada (2020), Voices: Artists on Art | 2017–1967 (2020), and the monograph Mary Kavanagh | Daughters of Uranium (2020).
Kavanagh was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2021 and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2024. Her work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Current Research
Kavanagh’s research brings artistic and scholarly methods into dialogue to examine the material, territorial, and embodied consequences of war, nuclear technologies, militarization, and industrial extraction. Through fieldwork, archival research, military embeds, residencies, collecting, and interdisciplinary collaboration, she investigates how political conflict and ecological violence become inscribed in bodies, objects, institutions, and sites.
Her projects have taken her across Canada, the United States, Australia, Japan, Europe, and the circumpolar North. Works including Distillation: in her element, Seeking Georgia, Shadow Archive, polish, Atomic Suite, Daughters of Uranium, Trinity, Seven Skies of Maralinga, and Opera Obscura explore relationships among personal memory, public history, material evidence, and institutional forms of knowledge and preservation.
Across these bodies of work, the archive is approached not as a neutral repository but as a material and territorial formation: something assembled, interpreted, preserved, withdrawn, dispersed, or lost. Through photography, moving image, drawing, and installation, Kavanagh creates spatial and sensory encounters that make visible the entanglement of public and private experience and respond to the conceptual, political, and felt imperatives of the research.