For artist, author and conservationist Maureen Enns, life may seem like a series of flukes that drop out of the sky, with one remarkable project leading to the next.
Enns, who lives in the MD of Bighorn near the Ghost River, is an accomplished artist and author whose work has taken her into the realm – both physically and spiritually – of the grizzly bear here in the Rockies and in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and, more recently, wild horses that inhabit the remote corners of the Ghost wilderness area.
But it is not by sheer fluke alone that Enns is able to grab these opportunities before they slip past her. Instead, she has developed the ability to remain open and alert to notice happenstances, those little slices in time that may seem inconsequential at first, but are in fact monumental. And it is these monumental moments that lead her down the different roads she travels.
While Enns’ projects may seem to be disparate, each are fundamentally linked, and two of these will be presented this week, one in Banff during the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and the other at the Canmore Public Library as part of its speakers’ series.
Prayer Flags in the Canadian Rockies, an exhibition of Enns’s latest paintings of Tibetan prayer flags superimposed against a backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, will be held on the third flood of the Kinnear Centre at The Banff Centre with a reception Saturday (Oct. 26) from 6-8 p.m.
Her presentation Wild Horses, Wild Wolves, meanwhile, will be held at the Canmore Public Library Monday (Nov. 4) at 7:30 p.m. with admission by donation.
So what do both projects have in common? Both represent freedom to Enns and provide deep meaning for her – and both of these projects came to her because she was paying attention.
“Wild horses and wolves represent who I am as a visual artist… the wilds (wild horses) represent the freedom that is vital for my emotional and intellectual survival. The prayer flags I photographed in Nepal spoke to me of that same freedom – to blow a spiritual connection between man and nature across our mountain vistas,” she said.
Enns began studying the wild horses of the Ghost River wilderness area after a chance encounter in 2006 while riding her mare Hope with a herd of six young stallions that she at first thought were domestic horses.
“I knew I was in a dangerous spot astride Hope, who I could feel was becoming excited. She twitched her tail – which is rather like winking – indicating her willingness to breed,” Enns wrote in her book Wild Horse, Wild Wolves.
Instead of rushing at the mare to begin competing for her, as domestic stallions might, with squeals, kicks and bites, the six stallions all tried to hide behind the same skinny tree, jostling back and forth. Before long they galloped away.
Enns goes on to say she has learned to trust her horses and she trusted Hope that day, knowing she could communicate with the wild horses, removing any fear she felt of the six stallions.
That encounter and her trust in Hope led Enns to give much of her life over to the wild horses she refers to as “wildies.”
This was not the first time the door to an incredible journey has been opened for her by a horse. She embarked on her grizzly bear path after her gelding, Spud, allowed Enns to be in close proximity with a female grizzly with cubs, not once but twice, without incident.
“The mother grizzly stood right beside us with a fresh kill while her cubs went scampering by. My mouth hung open and I totally trusted my horse’s instincts that this was not dangerous. It could be. And he would have responded differently if it was,” she said, adding her horse had picked up on the bear’s body language.
Without that she would have never been led to study grizzly bears in the Rockies or in Russia, where she learned the finer points of how animals communicate. That understanding, in turn, has led her to realize the wild horses of the Ghost River area are true wild horses and not escaped domestic, or feral, horses.
Over the past century, Enns said, these horses have “re-wilded.”
“I had no idea there was a group of horses that have been there since the early 1900s and that’s how long some of these horses have been in the area where I’ve been studying them. They’ve gone back to being wild animals. It took me a good summer to wrap that thought around my brain and you have to have an open brain to let that stuff filter in and there’s no way the average person would and it is my horse that really nailed it for me, that they are behaving like deer,” she said.
Had Enns not been open to trusting her horses Hope and Spud, and been paying attention to their body language and the animals they encountered, none of these paths may have opened to her.
Similarly, when a remote camera she placed in the Ghost photographed a wild stallion she called Kit being greeted by a dark-coloured wolf, if Enns hadn’t spent time with grizzlies, she wouldn’t have realized that the wolf was inviting Kit to play.
The wolves, it appears, do not hunt these particular horses and the horses, in turn, are safe from predation. So if the wolves are not hunting the horses, what then are they hunting? Well, Enns believes wolves are drawn to the horses because the horses attract deer. The wolves then prefer to prey on the deer, leaving the horses alone.
She cautioned that is still a theory, but one she wouldn’t have developed without her experiences.
“The artist’s emotional brain can go there faster,” she said. “Picking up on body language was a big part of what intrigued me the most with the Russia project and it was that knowledge that allowed me to pick up on the relationship between the wild horses and the wolves. I would have missed that had I not had the Russian experience with the bears,” she said.
Even though she didn’t have a horse to guide her, Prayer Flags in the Canadian Rockies emerged fully formed, guided instead by her intuition, or unconscious perception, which of course was at play with her grizzly and wild horse projects.
Travelling in Nepal in 2010, Enns was struck by the prayer flags fluttering from mountaintops, strung across valleys and adorning homes and the places where people have died.
“The beauty of these flags blowing and the sound of them... The sound is like when I visited the monarchs. It’s like a thousand butterflies. I started to photograph them and look at the people round them and they all have smiles on their faces and I started to realize the flags really captured me,” she said.
While reading Gaiety of the Spirit: The Sherpa of Everest by former Bow Valley resident Frances Klatzel, who now lives in Nepal, Enns realized that many of her favourite places in the Rockies are also places where friends have died climbing or those who were ill had gone to for one last hike.
She began to envision prayer flags blowing in the strong mountain winds here in the Rockies, from places like Assiniboine, Wilcox Pass and Mount Lougheed, but rather than start planting strings of prayers flags here, Enns chose a different tack.
“Physically, that is not going to happen because I wouldn’t want to impose a different religion and spirituality, you wouldn’t want to impose (that) and then I thought what if I digitally transposed some of my images from Nepal and later the … area (in India) where the Tibetan refugees live into locations in the Rocky Mountains. Would this be a message about the compassion of people and the kind of things I’m concerned about? Freedom of thought and exploration and the harmony between man and nature? That sounds trivial, but, as you know, it is a life-long pursuit.”
Prayer Flags in the Canadian Rockies, which is presented by Mountain Galleries of the Fairmont, is part of the Mountain Artwalk, a walking tour of all of the art and photography exhibits included in this year’s Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
Mountain Artwalk takes places Saturday (Oct. 26). Participants are asked to meet at the Eric Harvie Theatre patio at 4 p.m.
Artwalk ends downtown at Wild Flour Artisan Bakery and Café.
