Vancouver Art Gallery launches first indoor-nature art prescription program

Working with local doctors and BC Parks Foundation, facility opens Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape exhibition to those needing to improve their health and well-being

A visitor looks at paintings inside Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape. Photo courtesy BC Parks Foundation

IN THE FIRST COLLABORATION of its kind in Canada, and possibly the world, the Vancouver Art Gallery has joined forces with BC Parks Foundation’s PaRx to allow healthcare professionals to prescribe visits to the exhibition Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape.

The idea is that a trip to the show to view the artist’s expressive images of towering cedars and serene B.C. landscapes can be just as healing to mental health as a trip out to West Coast forests and oceanfronts. It’s being billed as “an immersive indoor art and nature experience in an urban setting” that may be more accessible to those unable to make a full trip out into the wild.

“This couldn’t have happened anywhere else in the world,” said Sirish Rao, interim co-CEO of the VAG, remarking on the unique bridge between science and medicine, nature, and visual art in the project.

The initiative builds on the PaRx program, which has seen more than 17,000 healthcare providers country-wide issuing a million-plus prescriptions for people to go out into nature for their mental well-being.

The gallery’s new addition to the program draws on a growing body of work that suggests spending time in nature can have positive effects on everything from chronic disease to birth outcomes—even over and above the benefits of exercise. At the press conference, Dr. Melissa Lem, PaRx director and a Vancouver family physician, cited studies that immersing oneself in nature—or in grand images of nature, like Emily Carr’s paintings—could lower cortisol levels and prevent depression in older age.

“Noticing how we feel when we connect with nature is what is actually healing,” added Paula Toledo, the VAG’s lead wellbeing consultant in the unveiling at the gallery today. “That is the key.”

PaRx encourages doctors to make nature time the fourth pillar of health, joining together with diet, exercise, and sleep habits.

Toledo also said connecting with the gallery and its community could help fight the loneliness and social isolation that the World Health Organization has deemed a public health problem. This year, Canada dropped to 18th place on the World Happiness Report, down from 15th last year and fifth in 2015. In 2018, a UBC and McGill University study found Vancouver to be the “unhappiest city in Canada”.

During the first year of the new VAG-PaRx program, each prescribed visitor and their optional guest receive free admission to the gallery. Visitors are allowed to return any number of times by retaining their PaRx nature prescription. A special printed guide for Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape encourages these visitors to “slow-look” at the paintings, connect to the images of nature, and reflect on how the experience makes them feel. The gallery predicts approximately 4,000 individuals to benefit from the social prescribing initiative during this first pilot year.

In conjunction with the program, the gallery is publishing the all-ages colouring book Colouring Carr, featuring Emily Carr’s nature-inspired paintings and drawings from the VAG’s collection. It’s available to pre-order in the Gallery Store.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is cofounder and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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