Ufuk Ali Gueray

Deep Bay Artists' Residency at Riding Moutain National Park

At Deep Bay, nothing remained. As artist-in-residence at the Manitoba Arts Council’s Deep Bay Cabin, I spent my time drawing in the landscape—marking surfaces, making images, and then watching them disappear. Each day, I worked in different locations around the park, speaking with hikers and visitors, folding their observations and stories into the process. The work existed in the moment, in conversation, in gesture.

At the end of the residency, the project culminated in a collective act of erasure. On a lawn bowling site, participants helped rub out the drawings, reducing them to faint ghosts of their former lines. Then, in a final ritual, we gathered the erased sheets and burned them in a firepit. No documentation, no archive—only the act itself, fleeting and irretrievable.

This was a project about invisibility, about what vanishes and what lingers. About art as an event, not an object.

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Manitoba Arts Council in making this project a reality.