The Gardens on Tenth gallery committee has announced a new exhibit for visitors to contemplate and enjoy.
This season’s exhibit offers two components: one wall features the work of Henry and Elma Martens, whose photography shares the beauty of the Pembina Valley, as well as information about the flora and fauna there, while the other wall holds a collection of various types of original art in a variety of media created by other Gardens tenants. These tenants include Jack Klassen, Elma Martens, Susan Peters, Anne Froese, Mary Rempel, Eva Schroeder, Dora Schroeder, and Dorothy Friesen.
Henry and Elma’s photography exhibit beckons the viewer to look deeper and observe the secret wonders hidden in nature.
Together, the couple has shared a living passion of caring for all of God’s creation, including people’s physical and spiritual needs. They spent many years establishing a Bible camp, a nature interpretive centre, and the Pembina Valley Provincial Park.
They both enjoyed photography long before they met.
“She had a little box camera at an early age, and I had my own when I was 14 or 15,” Henry recalls.
They grew up in different school districts but found each other through mutual friends. The rest, as they say, is history. After 57 years of marriage, they still think they’re a perfect match.
After working at Friesens Corp. for a number of years, they returned to education and followed a different path. Henry’s practicum work for his Master of Education degree was “Outdoor Education and Interpretation: Planning for an Interpretive Centre” which later became part of the master plan for the Pembina Valley Provincial Park in 2001. His first teaching assignment was at a remote First Nations Community in Northern Manitoba.
When their children reached school age, their family returned to Southern Manitoba where Henry continued his teaching career. Elma joined him as a teaching assistant after their children left home.
“We have always been interested in creation. We bought up land in the Pembina Valley, and with the help of others, developed the land.”
In 2000, they sold the land to the government, and it became the Pembina Valley Provincial Park.
“We built a house on site and lived there for a number of years, and that’s when the interpretive centre was built,” says Henry. “Our three children grew up planting trees and enjoying nature. We hosted many school groups and took them down the trails with volunteer interpreters.”
Now living at Gardens on Tenth, the couple still appreciates the lessons that nature has taught them.
Their exhibit is a virtual and meditative walk through the Pembina Valley, an invitation to experience the peace that exists in creation and a realization of our place in it.
“I want people to look a little bit beyond the surface,” Henry says. “Many times, we just walk by and don’t pay a lot of attention. The idea was to encourage people to stop and see beyond the surface. That’s why the last photo is called ‘Time Immemorial.’”
Henry has always sensed a gap in how people view creation.
“Some people think Christianity is not rational; that it’s just about faith. But I think there are very logical reasons to justify getting from here to there, and that there is a link between scientific knowledge and the spiritual creator. The purpose for the Interpretive Centre was to find a gap between the two.”
He goes on to say, “Just because you are scientifically minded doesn’t mean you’re an evolutionist. I find it hard to accept the world was made in six days. I think there is a very clear progression. I believe all of creation is possible in God’s infinite time. I give God all the glory. I don’t understand exactly how He did it. The important thing is that I believe He did it, and He’s bigger than six days. And He’s bigger than we are.”
The photographs in the exhibit show a progression, from a newborn fawn in a meadow, to wildflowers and tall grasses. It takes viewers on a journey through a wonderful world, with a face in the storm clouds, peace and progression personified in the Pembina River, to small creeks filled with rocks carried from another age, with everything in its place. A harmonious conflict occurs between thawing and freezing, from the fawn, to a once thriving giant birch tree, to a fallen log near a fossilized rock.
“This is a journey through creation. Past, present and future, all layered together in one composition.”
Visitors to the exhibit can also take a free copy of their book Footprints of Hope with them. Henry created Footprints in 2016 as a journey of discovery following the interpretive trails through the hundred-acre woods of the Pembina Valley Interpretive Centre.
The exhibit will be on display until the end of September.
