Biography

Bettina Harvey’s art is deeply informed by her relationship with the natural world. From her earliest years, Harvey has devoted herself to the outdoors, exploring, studying, and playing in nature. After working on a BFA at Montreal’s Concordia University, she spent years working as a horticulturist and as a gardener for the City of Vancouver, where she applied her visual art skills designing floral displays for major parks. Eventually, she merged her interests, returning to fine arts as a means of investigating ecological systems and their connections to the human world. 

Harvey has studied lithography, figure drawing, and encaustic painting with several Vancouver artists. However, her most recent work examines the intersections between botany, ecology, and humanity. Working within a metaphorical paradigm, several of Harvey’s series use images of driftwood pieces to interrogate the human lifespan, and the ways in which our complicated journey through time involves struggles with memory, identity, relationships, and love. Her art has been featured in various exhibitions around the Lower Mainland, including the Seymour Art Gallery’s Discovery show, the Ferry Building Gallery, and Kafka’s on Main. Her work is held in several private collections across North America.

Harvey lives with her husband and pets in Beach Grove, Tsawwassen, and frequently draws material from her explorations of the habitats around her home and near her mother’s home on Denman Island. 

Bettina Harvey would like to acknowledge that she is living and working on the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically the scəw̓aθən Tsawwassen First Nations.