About the Artist
TELUS STORY HIVE: On Location Interview April 2026
Destanne Norris, born in 1960 in Armstrong, British Columbia, is a Canadian painter whose work is grounded in a lifelong engagement with landscape, perception, and lived experience. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in Painting and Drawing from the University of Victoria in 1987 and later completed a Master of Fine Arts by Research at the University of Tasmania, Australia, in 2009.
Primarily an oil painter, Norris’ early professional practice developed in the Rocky Mountains of Jasper, Alberta, where she lived and worked immersed in the vast wilderness. A defining moment in her artistic journey came in 1995 with Leah’s Gift, an exhibition honouring the brief yet luminous life of her young daughter. Comprising interrelated works begun even before Leah’s birth, the exhibition marked both an expression of profound loss and an awakening. In its aftermath, Norris turned toward nature, seeking connection with the source of creation itself. Her work became a vessel for direct experience and was shaped by her relationship to place.
Driven by a desire for inquiry and expansion, Norris left the Rockies in 2003 to pursue postgraduate research at the University of Tasmania, an institution known for its focus on wilderness and natural environment studies. Her MFA thesis, Painted Pools: A Lens into Subjectivity, explored water as a metaphor for life, extending her engagement with the elemental world into more introspective and conceptual terrain.
After returning to the Okanagan in 2006, her practice evolved through a series of elemental investigations — earth, water, fire, air, and eventually the expansiveness of space and the cosmic unknown. These explorations reflected an inquiry into perception, transformation, and the relationship between inner and outer worlds.
While steeped in a longstanding engagement with landscape and the natural world, her work has increasingly moved beyond the depiction of place toward an exploration of presence — how we inhabit the world, carry memory, experience loss and connection, and locate ourselves within something larger than ourselves.
The human figure is returning to Norris’ landscapes, a presence that has appeared at important points throughout her practice and has become increasingly central to her recent work. Her 2025 project TWENTY 8 DAYS, a sustained series of paintings exploring the figure within landscape, opened a new chapter in this inquiry. She is interested in the figure as an embodied presence through which questions of belonging, vulnerability, resilience, and our relationship to place can emerge. Colour, atmosphere, gesture, and materiality become active elements, creating spaces of tension and possibility where outer landscape and inner life become inseparable.
Throughout her career, Norris has participated in workshops, artist-in-residence programs, and was elected a juried member of the Alberta Society of Artists. She has been represented by galleries across British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in public, university, artist-run, and commercial galleries. Her paintings are held in private collections worldwide, as well as in corporate and public collections including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Jasper National Park, the Penticton Art Gallery, the Orillia Museum of Art and History, Finning Canada, and the Consulate General of Japan.
In 2020, Norris published her debut book, Leah’s Gift: A Story About Reframing Loss, a personal reflection on transformation through grief. That same year, filmmaker Brian Taylor of Enqueue Film released the documentary Beneath the Painted Surface, offering an intimate glimpse into her art and life.
