According to its website, “At The Banff Centre, dining is a creative art… The Banff Centre does it with flair!” Behind the slick images of these dining rooms lies the kitchen—the space of heat, steam, and functional chaos where the imagery for this etching was actually generated.

Hawrysio’s connection to the site and to the Canadian Rockies is deeply personal; she worked as the centre’s vegetarian cook while a student in the late 1970s before returning to Banff for an artist residency in 2008. To capture the unmediated energy of the space, she left the etching plate in the staff dining room for several days, inviting employees to draw directly onto the metal.

She then took the plate into the kitchen, inviting cooks and other staff to collaborate by marking the surface—transforming the artist’s plate into a collective record of the workplace. The photograph Rocky Mountain Kitchen with Cooks is a re-enactment of an image taken thirty years earlier on the same spot, pairing Denise with the 2006 resident cook to mirror a 1970s original featuring a former colleague. This practice of artistic re-enactment functions as a bridge between eras, transforming a personal archival memory into a live, contemporary performance.