Lorraine Gilbert has been producing and exhibiting photographic works since 1978. These works have been featured in solo, group and two-person exhibitions such as Global Nature, a Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography Traveling Exhibition, and The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social at The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, both touring exhibitions. In the summer of 2012, her large botanical murals were exhibited in 'Flora and Fauna', an exhibition curated by Ann Thomas and Andrea Kunard, at the National Gallery of Canada, also a touring exhibition. In 2013, le Centre d’art Expression in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, produced a survey exhibition and catalogue both entitled Canadian Landscapes, presenting her major works about the natural/economic landscape, from BC to Quebec. Recently, Gilbert has revisited the sites of her earliest works of urban landscapes in Vancouver, (re-presented in 2018 in the group exhibition Site Unseen at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and is working towards a large exhibition about Vancouver’s urban, social, and architectural landscape.
From 1994 to 2004, Gilbert was also actively involved as a publisher, host and board member with an Artist-Run Centre: Boreal Art Nature, based out of her home in La Minerve, Québec. There, artists from North and Central America, and from countries overseas as far as Iceland and India came together in the Canadian Boreal forest for artistic production in thematic residencies. Boreal Art Nature also organized ‘nomadic’ residencies bringing together artists in culturally and ecologically sensitive locations including Iceland, Mexico and the United States.
Her current work continues her interest in nature, BC clear-cuts, and lately in the urban development of Vancouver, which also encompasses the social and economic aspects of landscape as a social space.
Gilbert has been teaching art and photography for the past 25 years, and is currently the Director of the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa. She has also taught at Concordia University in Montreal, NSCAD in Halifax, and at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. She has been nominated to the RCA, and she won the inaugural Karsh Award for Photography in Ottawa, in 2003. In 2010, she was awarded a 'Canadian Foundation for Innovation' grant through the University of Ottawa. She lives in Ottawa and in Quebec.