The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency gives Manitoban artists time to focus on their work in the beautiful natural setting of Riding Mountain National Park.
The next artist-in-residence for the 2026 season is Derek Dunlop. Ahead of his time in the historic Deep Bay Cabin, Derek answered a few of our questions about his work and how he’ll be spending his residency.
MAC: Tell us a little about yourself as an artist and your practice.
Derek: I am an interdisciplinary artist with a research-based practice working across photography, text, and installation. My recent work has been grounded in a sustained engagement with landscapes, archives, and sites shaped by cultural, aesthetic, and political histories. I am interested in how places are made meaningful through acts of representation and how ways of seeing shape relationships to land, memory, environment, and lived experience.
This work often unfolds through processes of fieldwork, collecting, and material experimentation. Through strategies of seriality, fragmentation, and juxtaposition, I explore ambiguity and the shifting relationships between image, language, and place. I approach artistic practice as an ongoing process of inquiry, attentive to how histories, systems of knowledge, and everyday encounters shape the ways art and nature are understood, represented, and experienced.
Tell us about your project — what will you be working on in the Deep Bay Cabin?
During my time at Deep Bay, I will be working on an artist book called Found Landscapes. The book examines how landscapes in Canada are shaped through visual and textual culture. Through photography, archival materials, found language, and image–text pairings, the project explores sites often understood as “natural” or neutral, revealing how ideas of beauty, conservation, and leisure shape how land and environments are understood. By disrupting assumptions that nature exists outside history and culture, the work invites more critical and reflective ways of seeing and relating to place.
What is your relationship with the park?
I had the opportunity to participate in the Riding Mountain Artist Residency in 2017, an experience that was deeply formative and shaped the research and artistic work I pursued over the following eight years. I look forward to returning to the cabin and studio and to seeing how the site and surrounding environment once again shape my practice. I am especially eager to revisit places that were meaningful during my previous residency—including the museum, cultural centres, and hiking trails—and to experience them again through the lens of this current project.
The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency is offered in partnership by the Manitoba Arts Council, Wasagaming Community Arts, and Riding Mountain National Park.
Interested in the staying in the Deep Bay cabin? Find out how to apply to the Riding Mountain Artists Residency through the Learn – Residencies grant stream. Apply by January 15, 2027 for a residency in the summer of 2027.
