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We look forward to learning with the following artists in 2024
Click on images to see their work

Rewild

ashley


Ashlee Mays
, Pigeon Forge, TN
Biophilium Research Leader
Director of the Museum of Infinate Outcomes

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality.

Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity.

Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing.

The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.


Mary Abma
, Bright's Grove, Ontario
Teacher's Assistant
ff
Mary Abma is a versatile artist who specializes in community-engaged artworks and environmental art. Always up for new challenges, Mary seeks constantly to push the edges of her practice and to learn new skills and information. Her artworks, which consist primarily of idea-based works executed in a variety of artistic forms, explore the theme of “place”. Her work embraces her interest in history, her concern for the environment, her passion for science, and her desire to find visual expression for her insights into the living world and the interconnectedness of systems. Mary’s recent works explore the systems of language and communication within the natural world.

Laura

 

 Laura Ahola, Pocatello, ID

I pay close attention to the world around me, from politics to science, so that I am not only prepared to respond in my work to issues but so I can differentiate in what demands my attention as an artist. Currently, I am responding to climate crisis. Extensive reading into geology, plant physiology, algae, history and climate science inform my body of work. Merging the ambiguous with scientific data results in layers upon layers of paint, metaphors and imagery in my work.

 

MIchelle

 

 

Michelle Bunton
Ontario, Canada

Michelle Bunton is a transdisciplinary artist/curator/derby jammer currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston. They are one-quarter of the micropress Small Potatoes, and one-half of the artist-duo Tear Jerkers.

Prioritizing femi-queer science, SF (speculative fabulation/science fiction) and diffractive pedagogy, they aim to embody a collaborative praxis that centres queer kinship. Bunton playfully embraces the potential of failure, uncertainty and decay in their practice, often taking up sport and science as framework for their multi-media installations. Their recent work turns to slime mold/lichen/fungi and their attendant characteristics of collective action, decentralized organization and abject re-composition of matter.

Crystal Crow, Rosemère, Quebec
@CrystaLynnWrites
Twitter: @_CrystaLynn_

Obsessed with otherness, I am a translator and a writer and a poet. Reading the world, writing it anew. Changing perspectives. A child of the 80s, I grew up poor in America, exploring the rich places accessible to me: the woods and fields beyond the trailer park. Seeing the creeks and rivers flood over, over and over, washing the fossil beds free of soil, free of the prairie’s black gold, exposing preserved remains. Where have the monarchs of my childhood gone?

I still see the milkweed bleeding in my small hands. Bitter white by the cornfield plowed over again to make way for condos and roads and more condos. The soil’s gone gray. Where have the monarchs of my childhood gone?

Rooted in grief and loss, my practice is about the beautiful things I remember, the beautiful things I see. And what could be. I pin them on the page. Dry wings, kindling. Around the fire, I tell stories built around human and nonhuman perspectives, inviting readers to move beyond an anthropocentric view. We disappear when a way of life consumes. Exhibit A. Flickering out like the monarchs of childhood gone.

Chloe
Chloe Lundrigan,
St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador

My current art practice is an exercise in observing the negotiations and representations of nature in Atlantic Canadian culture, as informed by my own experiences both growing up there and in the ecotourism tourism sector. Iʼm interested in the increasing plasticity̶or Bass-Pro-ification, thus commodification̶of this image, and use a combination of found objects, appropriated commercial text, and digital media to explore the
powers and vulnerabilities of recalcitrant ecologies (my love, the mudflats of the Bay of Fundy), shared language between queer and survivalist cultures, and a place for atonement in environmentalism.

In my developing academic work in the field of Folklore (the social transmission of informal art histories), I am focused on Newfoundlandʼs seabirds, examining the history of the extinction of the Great auk through ritual studies in contrast to the islandʼs current outwards facing identity̶the “Puffin Province”̶by speaking with its ornithologists, citizen scientists, and local bird lovers, ultimately making a case for the importance of creative traditions and community involvement in conservation science initiatives. Chloe Lundrigan (they) is an artist, arts-worker, and nature interpreter of settler descent raised in Miʼkmaʼki, the ancestral and unceded land of the Miʼkmaq (Sackville, NB) and currently based on the island of so-called Newfoundland, the traditional territory of diverse Indigenous groups including the Beothuk, Mʼikmaq, Innu and Inuit.

 

Francine

 

Francine Dulong, Halifax, Nova Scotia

I am a physical theatre artist and vocal improviser with a burgeoning practice in sound and music composition. My participatory theatre company, Blooming Ludus, explores humanity’s connection to the planet. I am also a member of THAT! ensemble, a London UK based improv group that uses dance, theatre and movement to compose live vocal music.

 
Germinate

kate

Katie Hart Potapoff, Dundee, Scotland
Biophilium Research Leader

Katie Hart Potapoff (She/Her) engages in a non-hierarchical approach through an interdisciplinary practice, working intuitively across processes and mediums such as drawing, installation, creative writing, fibre art, printmaking, metal casting, and clay sculpting. At the centre of her practice research is an exploration of the space in-between. She sees the creative process as an on-going and reciprocal dialogue; a liminal space of possibility to exchange ideas, shift perceptions, an invitation to inhabit a space that remains undefined.

Inspired by ideas of gathering, Potapoff’s recent work with fibre is an exploration into Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which borrows from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first ‘cultural tool’ was a gathering bag rather than a weapon. The organic fibre forms provide shallow depressions, pockets to hold gathered treasures. Some are empty, simply holding space, others enclose gold-leafed seeds.

Katie is currently completing her practice-led PhD at DJCAD, University of Dundee. She was recently awarded an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to fund her residency on the Isle of Iona. Her website is www.katiehartpotapoff.com and she is on Instagram @hartofkatie

ashley

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN
Biophilium Research Leader
Director of the Museum of Infinate Outcomes

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality.

Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity.

Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing.

The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

annie

Annie Temmink, Charlottesville, VA

I am an artist deeply connected to the theme of consciousness, with a particular interest in inner archetypes and how we set our true nature free. My work often involves intricate headwear and dance or creatures constructed from refuse. In my current practice, I am eager to engage with those who have varied knowledge about the plant world to expand my own potential to work with plant matter and its wisdom, and how to use it to expand human consciousness and conscientiousness of materials. I am thrilled to read about this program and am wholeheartedly committed to joining and using what I may learn to enrich my community.

Danielle
Danielle Petti, Waterloo, Ontario

The harsh truths of our effect on climate and biodiversity evoked fear and triggered a desire to grasp the earth and create with it, to make sense of what it means to be human. Over the last three years, I have explored these themes through research, foraging for colour, and painting. Noticing that natural materials provide a wide range of colour and complexity was my initial step into making artwork sustainably and mindfully; two features that are important as we navigate an environmental and societal precipice. Slow contemplative processes (making pigments from rocks) quiets the mind and makes the process itself salient. I am informed by nature and my colour palette is limited to the earth within reach, forcing me to use composition and material more creatively. I try to make viewers feel the same interconnectedness I feel when spreading dirt across canvas with my hands. I am interested in the intersection between art and science; how research in geology and ecology informs my artwork and allows me to approach various projects through a scientific lens. Part of my work is driven by motherhood and generational knowledge; how can we unearth lost memories of a once-known balance between human and environment? This is especially noticeable in my figurative works. My abstract earth pigment landscapes on the other hand are created with the intention of evoking contemplativeness and wonder for the natural colours of the planet.

Monika
Monika Kinner
,
Saskatoon / Jackfish Lake (both in Treaty Six Territory)

I am a professional artist specializing in freestyle embroidery (since 2009) as well as soft pastel paintings (since 2018). My creations are expressions of love for the prairie and originate from my own personal photographs and experiences of Saskatchewan. I am constantly amazed at the texture and intricate beauty that can be achieved by working with threads.
 
Self-taught in needle arts, pastel painting, drawing, and photography, I have been practicing and exploring a combination of these disciplines full time since 2009. A very positive public response to my work has gained me exhibition invitations, awards, media attention, teaching & public speaking opportunities, as well as commissions locally, nationally, and internationally.

As my work evolves, my most fulfilling experiences have been those which inspire and spark others. From the gratitude of a new owner holding art I've created, to the communities of all ages to whom I've introduced fibre art to, to the personal discoveries and breakthroughs during courses taught and research grants I've received. All of these experiences inspire my journey.

Sam

Samantha Schwartz
Brooklyn, NY

I am a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist, and like all organic structures, I am in constant flux. I envision futures that are borderless, shape-shifting, river-like, matriarchal, anti-cartesian, fertile for chistes (jokes), warm communities (and climate), scientific, healing and imaginative.

Have you ever seen ash fall from an active volcano? It is like sugarcane burning for harvest.

There are tensions between harm and harvest, sweet and sweat, earth and birth. I hold these tensions close to my heart. Volcanos and maize are recurring motifs that I continue to explore as an artist. The volcanos swell with lava, bright red craters a reminder of the potential for catastrophic eruption. Corn grows across borders in the Americas, becoming symbols of migration, labor, nourishment, and abundance.
I use industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, and electricity, in harmony with corn husk, water, palo santo, shells, and bacteria. I want to swim to the edge of borders, climate disaster, and linger in our strangeness. My work is umbilically connected to themes of female desire, sensuality, spirit, and a striving for care.

Doris Lamontagne

 

Doris Lamontagne, Ottawa, Canada

My art reflects on the interactions between beings in adjacent environments. It highlights the contrasts and similarities between beings and exposes the dynamism that emerges from these relationships. Whether ecological, geographical or cultural, my art makes an attempt to illustrate the dynamic nature of these worlds: attraction versus opposition.

In this series of five prints, I explore “panpsychism” which entails that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality. All things share these mental qualities: feeling, inner life, subjectivity, and perception. All things experience pleasure, pain, visual or auditory sensations, etc.

In my research, I investigate the possibility that one destiny of a being affects the destiny of all beings. Call it ecology, Gaia or holistic, everything is connected: the equilibrium between the forces of attraction and opposition keeps us breathing.

 
Christina
Christina Anastassopoulos
, Ottawa, Ontario

As a painter I am fascinated by biology and language and aim to create a visual thread that circles around ideas to help foster environmental stewardship. Drawing inspiration from the interplay between species and ecosystems, and creating visual narratives bolstered by language - the symbols, metaphors, and stories that humans use to place order within our world, I strive to capture the movement and flow that nature holds with each brushstroke that I create.

My current work is focused on ideas of subversion in many aspects, as I paint images of wildflowers while contemplating the idea of ‘otherness’ and the social dynamics that it exists within.

Through my paintings, I invite viewers to contemplate the beauty and complexity of our shared existence, of the ways in which we construct our world through language and to embark on a journey of discovery that transcends the boundaries of disciplines. For in the synthesis of art and science, I believe we can find new ways of understanding our place in this universe and effect positive change to the seemingly downward spiral that consumerism and capitalist ventures impose on this earth.

kenzie
Kenzie Adair
, Tulsa, OK

My most recent body of work is informed by Ecofeminist philosophy, which links the commodification of the natural world with historical subjection of women and minorities. I am interested in the physical and intellectual separation of the body from its native environment that might result from our reliance on unsustainable resources, the pervasiveness of synthetic materials, and increasing investment in digital spaces. The dissonant belief that we are independent from other living organisms is necessary to continue these practices that serve human life at the expense of the environment. In this work I layer synthetic materials and digital imagery with abstract bodily forms and organic elements to create a relative space, free from imposed hierarchy. In this space, relationships between the body, its environment, and outside influences are revealed for new consideration.

The formal components of my work include various representations of nature and the body, which range from realistic to highly-simplified icons. I start by layering patterns made of sewn or digitally printed fabric. Minimally processed organic elements, such as dried flowers and raw wool, are crossed with industrial materials, such as epoxy resin and polymer fabric, and applied to the surface. Abstract figurative shapes derived from life drawings break up patterns and establish the dominant composition of each piece. The resulting works are medium-scale paintings dense with patterns of botanical and figurative forms, finished with contrasting tactile surface applications

Bailey
Bailey Fritz, Maryville Tennessee

I create intentionally decorated functional pottery. After studying sustainability as an undergraduate, I felt inspired to create pieces inspired by flora, fauna, and symbols from my upbringing as a queer person in the south. Ceramics have a certain permanence that single use objects do not - utility, longevity and reuse are vital to combatting our ecological crisis. With the loss of species across the globe, I am drawn to display and preserve the keystone and threatened species of Appalachia. Similarly, I am interested in preserving cultural symbols of craft and domestic objects from the south. In the same way that many species are overlooked, queer culture and people in the south are often invisible, yet vital. The extent of my arts education has been through craft school work-exchanges, community classes, and hours spent practicing in my local community studio; my practice is fueled by community, ecology, and craft as a whole.

 
mortem
Annie


Annie Temmink
, Charlottesville, VA

I am an artist deeply connected to the theme of consciousness, with a particular interest in inner archetypes and how we set our true nature free. My work often involves intricate headwear and dance or creatures constructed from refuse.

I have long been eager to learn about world rituals surrounding death and afterlife care, and I believe this knowledge could greatly enrich my artistic practice. I am eager to explore the topic of death and how it brings meaning to life. I am particularly curious about death Doula roles, and supporting others in grief.

 

We have had the pleasure of learning with the following artist
Click on images for more info

2023
Eavesdrop
jyg
Michelle Bunton

Instructor, Ontario, Canada

Michelle Bunton is a transdisciplinary artist/curator/derby jammer currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston. They are one-quarter of the micropress Small Potatoes, and one-half of the artist-duo Tear Jerkers.

Prioritizing femi-queer science, SF (speculative fabulation/science fiction) and diffractive pedagogy, they aim to embody a collaborative praxis that centres queer kinship. Bunton playfully embraces the potential of failure, uncertainty and decay in their practice, often taking up sport and science as framework for their multi-media installations. Their recent work turns to slime mold/lichen/fungi and their attendant characteristics of collective action, decentralized organization and abject re-composition of matter.

ashley

Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

Director of the Museum of Infinate Outcomes

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Isla
Isla Greenwood
, London, UK

I am a multidisciplinary artist whose focus is on the ways creative energy enhances relational dynamics amongst humans and non humans. I draw from a vast field of pre existing knowledge of the world through stories and myth and a background in Anthropology, whilst combining these elements with insight and metaphor developed whilst spending time in the natural world.

Listening is a key part of my practice and my journey with music really began as a listener, and through the work of Pauline Oliveros and the deep listening practice and David Abram’s text ‘The Spell of the Sensuous. My practice includes poetry, song, electronic music, movement and movement therapy, art textiles and public speaking, all of which pivot around themes of connectedness, joy and vitality for creating and sustaining a world of energised and enlivened people during times of great change and crisis.

My practice is really a record of what I learn when paying closer attention to the nuances in perception, a diary to myself of adventures in immersion, and a gift to others who may be feeling similar things, yet feeling at a loss for language to relay them.

Stacy
Stacy Fahrion
, Centennial, CO
Composer, pianist, educator, just intonation enthusiast

In a 2018 interview, after writing an album of solo piano pieces called Lullabies for Arachnophobes, I was asked what I was going to do next. I responded that I was going to write an album of music for spiders that are afraid of humans. While I was half-joking, studies of non-human animals, particularly studies of how they experience sound, fascinate me, and non-human created sounds are my inspiration more than any
other music.

My music is often inspired by things like learning about the mating rituals of jumping spiders, or how ogre spiders “listen” to vibrations.
Another recent piece was inspired by imagining trees communicating through mycorrhizal networks. Something I want to do next is write a piece inspired by the rhythm of crickets at night. Lately I’m very interested in letting my music feel like it is growing organically, letting the structure and melodies of my recent music often slowly evolve with slight variations.

One of the reasons my music in the past three years has all been in just intonation is that I believe that the infinite variety of microtones one can
draw from the harmonic series better represent the beautiful diversity in nature. Equal temperament, what has become the standard tuning today, is much less resonant and colorful than music that uses exact partials from the harmonic series.

I’m always curious to learn from and connect with scientists and other artists who are inspired by both science and nature.

Judith



Judith Modrak
,

I am a Washington, D.C. born, New York City based sculptor and installation artist. I am fascinated by what goes on inside and outside of us – from the composition of brain cells, to the intricacies of emotional vulnerability, to the ways in which memories are formed and stored, to the fragility and beauty of the ecosystem we inhabit. My audience participatory installations and free-standing sculptures manifest different aspects of our internal makeup, highlighting the reciprocity between inner impressions and the external world. These two sides, taken together, unmask how our personal and collective experiences develop and evolve in the context of the larger environment.

My art practice is currently most influenced by science and activism, in particular neuroscience (brain cells and neural networks), histology (cells and connective tissue), paleontology (fossils), and environmental activism (climate change). I have become increasingly drawn to create eco-inspired and participatory art works, such as “Endangered Fossils” currently on display in Santa Clarita, CA and “Our Memories”, formerly installed as part of NYC Parks Public Art program.

Elisabeth

E. R. Murray (writer, West Cork, Ireland) 

Elizabeth Rose Murray writes novels, non-fiction, short stories and poetry for children, young adults and adults. Her books include Caramel Hearts and the award-winning Nine Lives Trilogy; The Book of Learning (Dublin UNESCO Citywide Read 2016), The Book of Shadows (shortlisted Irish Literacy Association Award & Irish Book Awards), and The Book of Revenge. Recent anthology/journal publications include Mslexia, York Literary Review, Women on Nature, Ponder Review, Paper Lanterns, Reading the Future, Terrain, Not Very Quiet, Elysian: Creative Responses, Autonomy, Popshots, Banshee, and Ropes

Elizabeth’s writing is always deeply embedded in themes of place and belonging. From adventure stories to personal essays to nature writing, a key element of her work – both fictional and factual – is how the ‘self’ functions within a given locality, the boundaries presented as a result, and ways to overcome or bend those limitations.

She is also dedicated to exploring the writing and reading process; how we write and why, the ways writing happens off the page, what impacts the themes we write about, and how others respond as a result. Elizabeth has a deep interest in probing the liminal spaces between expectation and possibility; investigating words as private experience, art, and political outlet, while seeking ways to make the written word more accessible for all.

Elizabeth lives in West Cork, Ireland, where she fishes, forages, grows her own veg, and spends as much time as possible adventuring outdoors to fuel her stories.

iug


Ashley Czajkowski,
Arizona

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.

isobel

Isabel Winson-Sagan
,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

 
wild color

Ashlee maysAshlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

kate

Katie Hart Potapoff, Dundee, Scotland
Teacher's Assistant

Katie Hart Potapoff (She/Her) engages in a non-hierarchical approach through an interdisciplinary practice, working intuitively across processes and mediums such as drawing, installation, creative writing, fibre art, printmaking, metal casting, and clay sculpting. At the centre of her practice research is an exploration of the space in-between. She sees the creative process as an on-going and reciprocal dialogue; a liminal space of possibility to exchange ideas, shift perceptions, an invitation to inhabit a space that remains undefined.

Inspired by ideas of gathering, Potapoff’s recent work with fibre is an exploration into Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which borrows from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first ‘cultural tool’ was a gathering bag rather than a weapon. The organic fibre forms provide shallow depressions, pockets to hold gathered treasures. Some are empty, simply holding space, others enclose gold-leafed seeds.

Katie is currently completing her practice-led PhD at DJCAD, University of Dundee. She was recently awarded an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to fund her residency on the Isle of Iona. Her website is www.katiehartpotapoff.com and she is on Instagram @hartofkatie

Anne

Anne Mavor, Portland, Oregon

My artwork combines storytelling, research, physical action, imagery, and collaboration to illuminate social, environmental, and personal issues. This has included painting, printmaking, book arts, sculpture, installation, and performance. Using my own life as source material for content, I have explored and contradicted sexism, parent and artist oppression, disability, white supremacy, disconnection from place and home, and illness.

Since 2020 I have been investigating my spiritual, physical, and familial relationship to plants to heal cultural and ancestral disconnection. Using observation, research, and the process of botanical contact printing on reused fabric, I look for connections between me and the plants I find around me in my yard and neighborhood. How can I learn about them, interact with them, collaborate with them, listen to them, and see them intimately? Can I become aware of the inherent bond between me and the landscape?

I am drawn to botanical printing because of the directness and surprise of the process. It reveals hidden colors, shapes, and textures of each plant depending on the season, age, health, type of plant, and individual leaf or flower. I experience the images, sculptures, and installations that emerge from this printing process as beings with characters and messages.

 

isobel

Isabel Winson-Sagan
,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

uyf

Valérie Chartrand
, Winnipeg

I’ve always been fascinated by insects and by what their presence tells us about the world, both from a scientific and a metaphorical perspective. Insects through the ages have been perceived by various cultures as symbols and messengers. Today, the obsvervation of insects as bioindicators also speaks of the state of our ecology.

Primarily a printmaker, many of my prints use dried (found, never killed) insects in soft ground etchings to result in what resembles a fossil. The resulting image preserves the insect and is infused with its symbolism. Process and experimentation are at the core of my practice. I have been exploring encaustics, electroplating and insect prints of many forms including electroetching, cyanotype and photography.

As a first solo exhibition, I created Ghost Hives, a dystopian scenario through which to
contemplate causes and consequences of the disappearance of bees. I worked with bees from collapsed colonies to commemorate their past existence and reflect on their disappearance.

Through exploration, I seek to uncover what the presence and absence of insects today is telling us and how it impacts our environment and our lives.

Mariia
Mariia Shilnikova
, Enonkoski, Finland

As a female ceramic artist working from my home studio in Enonkoski, Finland, I am deeply passionate about the natural world and committed to preserving it for future generations. I find great inspiration in the wild, natural pigments and forests that surround me, and seek to incorporate them into my work in a way that celebrates their beauty and diversity.
Through my use of natural pigments and glazes, I hope to revive an ancient tradition that is both sustainable and environmentally responsible. By sourcing my materials directly from the forests and wild places that inspire me, I am able to create organic shapes and textures that reflect the natural world around us.

In my artistic practice, I am driven by a desire to inspire others to pay closer attention to the world around them, and to care for it in a more meaningful way. I believe that we are all stewards of the environment, and that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve it for future generations. Ultimately, my aim is to create organically shaped ceramic interior objects that are not only beautiful, but also serve as a reminder of the importance of sustainability and conservation.

Through my work, I hope to inspire others to join me in this mission, and to work towards a more sustainable and environmentally responsible future for us all.

susie

 

Susie Osler, Ontario, Canada

Since 2002 I have inhabited a pocket of land, situated on the unceded traditional Omàmìwininì (Algonquin) territory - that is now commonly known as Lanark County, in eastern Ontario. The gift of this space and my life within it offers me the ability to revel slowly in the natural world and develop a certain intimacy with it. Worlds open up with time spent engaged in looking and sensing. Somewhat mysteriously, the wonder of it all feeds my creative life.

How place and/or ‘the land’ works on us interests me. Margins and verges are rich terrains for the imagination - spaces where control and abandon, the domestic and wild, and the intermingling of culture and nature can be explored. Such tensions can also resonate within an object or a drawing.

I work primarily with clay. Though in recent years, I have also been exploring more 2D work and creating small and large drawings alongside the ceramic work. Clay is both deliciously visceral to work with and technically demanding which can make life as a ceramic artist interesting if not uncertain at times.  I make objects whose purpose may be to interact with, to contemplate, to observe, or to touch.  Pleasure, intimacy, ceremony, reverence and delight are responses I hope to provoke.

I moved to a farm after completing a BFA at The Emily Carr Institute for Art and Design (Vancouver, 1999), followed by a few years as a resident artist at Toronto’s Harbourfront Center. When not working in the studio I can be found gardening, following my chickens around with a camera, trying to play mandolin, writing about plants (Instagram @pineoakyarrow) and hosting events that connect people with the natural world through soulful activity.


ouy

Meg Nicks
, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me. Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

 

 
2022
Mortem

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Ashley Czajkowski,
Arizona

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.

jay

 

Jay Davani, Providence, Rhode Island

I am a death-curious artist exploring how to use my creative
talents to help people who help people. I started taking film photos in 2003 and still maintain an intentional approach to shooting. A huge part of my photography practice is bringing attention to what others can't see or don’t want to face. I am drawn to capture moments that are painfully beautiful and where symmetrical order exists inside disorder. My work is of many, but unlike most.

More importantly, I'm a storyteller.

I invite my audience to consider life's most profound questions through my captions derived from personal experience. A few years ago, I returned my practice to black and white format to focus on composition. My photography is an expression of who I am, what I'm feeling, how I think, and what I see. Whether it's a shadow or fleeting moment, I prefer shooting in natural light.

NOvem

Claudia Chagoya, Calgary, Alberta

My artistic practice engages with topics such as the diverse, ingrained, misogynistic understanding of women prevalent in Mexican society, and the violence waged against them stemming from these assumptions. The most extreme outcome of this violence is Feminicide. The attitude of neglect from authorities and society in general, deeply affects the way victims are mourned and how families try to overcome the tragedy. This disruption of grieving processes is what my current work focuses on.
My practice involves the use of textiles, preserving rose petals, drawing, and printmaking, among others, with an emphasis on repetition and delicate procedures. Repetition in my work references the systematic violence of feminicide and a ritualized cleansing of such violence. Therefore, my method of creation is a ritualized action, which uses repetitive transformation to give meaning to the actions present in my process.

The intention of my work is to invite the community to mourn together and enable social engagement through the contemplation of mourning rituals within an artistic practice. I consider grief as a unique but shared experience, especially when feminicide is present worldwide. Engaging people in this matter is important to finding new forms of creating supportive communities and cross-cultural understanding.

elisha

 

Elisha Enfield, Wooburn Green, UK

Elisha Enfield’s work is concerned with the liminal, the betwixt and between. Her subjects linger at the edges of perception, as some people experience the souls of the departed. We feel rather than know them to be present.

The idea of the photographic image haunts Enfield and her work. It is by its very nature an absence, a record of things passed. Yet the moving image is a site for the spectacular, our modern equivalent for the powers of telepathy, seances, levitation, all those assurances that there is more. That hunt itself may be the premise of Enfield’s work. The hope that if we wait long enough, and look closely enough, we will see something. These phenomena, at the edges of understanding, are never fixed or solid. There is only ever the possibility of appearance.
Using footage of the German celebration of Walpurgisnacht, her current body of work explores Hexenbrennan – witch burning. It is a continuation of Enfield’s exploration of fire, which she uses as an elemental anchor point for the otherworldly. Reliant on oxygen, it is considered sentient by firefighters; running across ceilings, deciding who it consumes, who survives. Behind its beauty lies a promise of destruction and absolute power. The divided history of burnings mirrors this narrative, from ancient funeral pyres, through Christian Saint canonization, to witch hysteria. Though modern Walpurgisnacht has returned to light-hearted community celebration, the witch burning remains. Simple, joyful, yet macabre.

Now we are living through our own cataclysm, and many of the fire's that burn do so without onlookers. As our rituals have evolved, one thing is certain. Our future will be shared with the ghosts of the choices we make now.

Come The SLumberless

 

Traci Brimhall, Manhattan, Kansas

In grief, the cure is the sickness. Like many people in mourning, I was advised to create rituals to process loss. Alexandre Malraux said “you don’t return from hell with empty hands,” so I began to travel to sites of ghost and ruins to give myself the physical space and distance to process emotion into language. The act of grief pilgrimage allowed for healing because pilgrimages take time, and time is one of mourning’s most reliable medicines. I’ve taken my grief to haunted doll museums, the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities, a psychiatric hospital-turned-museum, to a former zookeeper’s bone collection, and even overnight in a haunted house. Each journey conducts itself in a circle, like traversing the labyrinth on a cathedral floor, drawing me closer to a center of something I still want to say. My work uses this lens of pilgrimage to craft grief as an episodic plot, one that weaves between personal emotional intensity and historical context to help give a sense of connection and meaning to the journeying, to the hope it can arrive at a terminus and be whole again, or at least return from hell with full hands.

Chloe

 

Chloe Lees, Spalding, UK

The condition of mortal existence manifests in the actuality that we are not contained within the bounds of flesh. Irrefutably inevitable in our mortality is the leaking, shedding and oozing of the mental and physical body. Blood, sweat, urine, semen, skin, hair, teeth and faeces will forever leak and fall and crumble. Concurrently, the mind writhes and oozes, leaching itself into all things. We do not wholly exist within our body but also within the objects of our being, both tangibly and perceptually saturated in grotesque humanity.

Within her artistic practice, Lees aims to expose this subliminal reality, invoking discomfort and existential anxiety. Working across mediums of sculpture, digital configuration, installation and collage, she is a research driven artist employing practice to illuminate theory and vice versa. She utilises both physical and psychological aspects of daily life, focusing that of the visceral and the domestic in works using food, shed bodily remnants and table ware. Contemplating how her sculptural and digital outcomes draw interesting relationships with the synthetic and the bodily, she questions the ways in which we both physically and mentally relate to structural and technological form. She explores implications of mortality through deformation and ephemeral material, bringing into question the disembodied and the post-human. Melding and manipulating the essence and substance of mortal reality, Lees creates abject materialisations of the mind

 

janna


Janna Ahrndt
, Bloomington IN

I position myself in a wave of new media artists rejecting the notion that craft and technology are directly opposed. In my work, I endeavor to dismantle the borders between traditional crafted textiles and new media technologies even further by exploring their parallel histories and exploring how the tactile medium of textiles enhances my technological work and vice versa. An asset of this combination is bringing interventions outside of the purely digital space back to the physical, making it beneficial to my activist/social art practice. More importantly, I believe this transition of the digital to physical can be used to provoke action as a part of a participatory/community art practice. Technology is so undeniably embedded in our daily lives in the form of house appliances, media platforms, electronic gadgets, we can become almost blind to it. By hijacking everyday technologies or even making our own, we can jolt ourselves into questioning the ways in which they are created, marketed, and used. Using these pervasive technological systems in ways they were not intended produces an opportunity for guerilla art tactics. DIY (Do it yourself) technologists and crafters share roots in rebellion and resistance. New media like craft stretches the bounds of aesthetics, often creating intuitively with shared knowledge to produce objects with similar rough and ready styling.

Emma Victoria Ginader, Bloomsburg, PA

The absence of certainty and closure haunts my poetry. How can we mourn someone when we still have questions about their life or never had a final in-person goodbye with them? Is misremembering something about them another form of death? I never got to record my ailing father talking about his memories because of my schedule. I can recall jotting down as many memories of him as accurately and quickly as possible immediately after his death. Since there
might not be an afterlife, I needed to remember him correctly. This impulse has led me to investigate evolving concepts of the afterlife and immortality. These ideas form the crux of my first manuscript. I aim to examine different forms of afterlife, how to best love another person, and how language shapes our understanding of memory and
death. I use historical, scientific, and religious documents as a jumping-off point to inspire new ways to write poems about these topics impact on my life. I hope to confront my anxieties about my death and relationships and give myself a chance to heal.

My poetry has appeared in periodicals such as Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry & Art, The Moth Magazine, december magazine, and most recently, Love Me, Love My Belly. My honors include selection by the Mount Holyoke English Department to represent the school at the 2015 Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest and the 2012 Five College Poetry Fest. I graduated with an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where I edited the Online Poetry
section for the Columbia Journal literary magazine. I currently work as a freelance writer, editor, and graphic designer.

 

 

Squared Circle

 

Andrea Charise, Toronto, Canada

My ceramic forms are generous and substantial, deliberately working with curves, size, and texture to fully realize clay’s intrinsic abundance. My functional work often involves wheelthrown, iron-rich, cone 6 stoneware decorated with rustic, expressive lines and non-toxic, food safe glazes. My one-of-a-kind sculptural works explore more abstract, larger-scale, often coil-built forms, ornamented with innovative, experimental glaze formulas developed in conversation with each unique ceramic object. Both functional and sculptural works reflect my interest in emphatically textured, even weathered, surfaces: an aesthetic translation of my professional background in geriatrics, and a personal meditation on the inevitability of aging’s marks on bodies--flesh and clay alike.

The Squared Circle Clay is a medium that traverses seemingly opposite elements, states, and forms: be they liquid|solid, novel|ancient, fragility|endurance, constancy|volatility, or art|science. Long used as an alchemical symbol, the “squared circle” offers a fitting motif for my own understanding of ceramics practice, denoting the interplay of elemental materials in hightemperature conditions to produce extraordinary effects on clay and glaze. Its more personal resonances speak to my integration of creative practices with health research methods—often thought of as diametrically opposed or even incompatible worldviews—as well as my lifelong appreciation for professional wrestling. The wrestling ring (aka "the squared circle") provides contemporary inspiration for my functional and sculptural work. From my signature “Hardcore Pots” functional ware, which utilizes for surface decoration the iconic props of hardcore deathmatches like barbed wire, thumbtacks, and pizzacutters; to more conceptual engagements with the art of wrestling, as in the collectible “Busted Open” sculptural vessel series. Channelling the ancient classical association of Greco-Roman ceramics with wrestling’s aesthetic richness, my pottery debuts a fresh vision of clay’s infinite potential as a twenty-first century art and craft medium.

 

September 2022
mycophilia

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Michelle Bunton
, Teacher's Assistant
Ontario, Canada

Rooted in a space of paradox, my practice attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video or sound record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body/psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations, my work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another in a perseverance towards preservation. My practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” which is defined as an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. I consider technology-based archives to occupy this intermediate reality, offering a critical venue through which to examine larger themes, such as gender, sexuality, death and decay.

Germany

Robin Germany, Lubbock Texas

In a new and developing body of work, I am creating photographic collages of mushrooms that propose an imagined web of hyphae or connecting systems below the ground. With this work I am expanding my interest in the hidden linkages and systems within the natural world and the limits of our understanding. It is the revealed and the concealed aspect of nature that particularly holds my attention. This work is in
the earliest phase of development and it is the main project I intend to focus on in the foreseeable future. Prior to this exploration, my photographic images framed the water to articulate a similar
above/below, seen/unseen relationship. For ten years I made images in bodies of water in Texas, with the camera positioned at the line between the air and water. The water is seen in the context of science, religion and history, delivering limited facts and uncertain truths, at the nexus of a conversation about the transience of knowledge and constancy of change. In both bodies of work, I investigate the cultural understanding of nature, suggest new ways to understand the natural world, and allude to the mystery and power of the natural forces.

ryan

 

Ryan Parra, Mesa, Arizona

Our ancestors' knowledge and value of the environment's flora was vital. Everywhere, they were surrounded by potential balms, poultices, pain relievers, euphoriants, and entheogens, using these systems as tools for the sustenance of their bodies and edification of their spirits. Yet, where these ethnobotanical gardens once grew now stand pharmacies with suspiciously clean white walls and endless supplies of medicine. While advancements in pharmacology are indeed essential, at the same time it's unreasonable to not have a fundamental understanding of the plants from where they derived, along with the wisdom and value of the natural world left behind by our forebears.

Over the past ten years I've been working on a project titled Vivarium, consisting of still life photographs and digital composites of medicinal flora growing throughout the southwest and beyond. Through this ethnobotanical survey, as I create each constructed photograph with inserted symbols and metaphors highlighting each plant’s unique history not only is it my priority to document the flora with scientific precision for identification purposes, but I also have a curiosity for expanding the definition of the “still life pushing these techniques which emerged in the artist’s studio out into the plant’s environment. Furthermore, by accompanying each photograph with a description of the flora’s unique history, I also aspire to remind viewers of the magical, symbiotic role plants have played in our exploration of knowledge and well being for hundreds of thousands of years.

Further reflecting this interest in the curious intersection of culture and nature, the project title Vivarium (Latin for “place of life”) refers to an enclosed space with plants or animals for observation and research purposes. This subtle act of concealing fragments of the natural world expresses a sense of power one has over something much like science with nature, while also expressing great curiosity and love towards that same thing. From here, visual narratives of curiosity, containment, and control evolve as the conceptual framework that I explore throughout these photographs.

Hannah

 

Hannah Bestly Burt, London, UK

Hannah’s practice is grounded in an urgent love for the overlooked natural world, the aesthetics of the imperfect and a belief in a political imperative to encourage joy in the world. A current project is a series of ‘mycelium fragment’ wall-hangings - sculptural wall-based objects composed of woven wool networks of Mycelium-like structures. To express these branching and fusing webs Hannah developed a method of hand-weaving 3D networks using purpose-built frame looms and ‘loose’ random warp combined with double or triple layers of weft. Through this work Hannah wants to elevate fungi - to argue for the uncanny beauty of this overlooked Kingdom. Hannah is fascinated by how mycelium complicates the idea and value of individuality and she is inspired by the hope that fungi have to offer as a remedy to human impact on the environment.

Another body of Hannah’s work is a collection of ‘Heraldic Banners for the Natural World.’ Hannah inverts the traditions and symbols of heraldry, creating quiet tapestries with standards of spore prints, burdock roots and tangled branches. These are objects of veneration, prioritizing the overlooked underland, but they are also objects of protest, a way of declaring dedication to the protection of the natural world.

Alec

Alec Chalmers, Leeds, UK

I am interested in the intersection of architecture, ecology and sustainability, and worldbuilding. I am interested in many different areas that might intersect with these subjects, such as using different aspects of biology to design new ways of building worlds. I approach my work from the perspective of a Concept Artist with an eye for exciting design, utilising the same skills and production workflows used in production in the game and film industries.

I have a BA (Hons) Visual Communication (Animation) from Birmingham City University and an MA in Concept Art for Games & Animation from Teesside University. I also have a Fellowship qualification with the Higher Education Academy, for teaching at the Higher Education level.

josephine

Josephine Rutherfoord, Bucks UK

My name is Josephine Rutherfoord and I am an artist whose curiosity about the world above me, below me and in me has led me to work in the space where art meets science. Collaboration with scientists is a core part of my practice. I use a variety of processes and media – drawing, cyanotypes, 3D printing, video and cast sculptures in latex and wax.  I have worked with a range of subjects from IVF and miscarriage to mycelium and fungi.


‘i grandi dolori sono muti’ (2006) was a work that came from my experience of having a miscarriage and was an installation of small sculptural forms made from latex and wax. The forms fitted in the palm of my hand and were voids, the latex ones filled with my breath to stop them from collapsing. The work expressed the loss and emptiness following a miscarriage.

My recent work, ‘AboveBelow’, (2021) shown at Ovada gallery in Oxford was inspired by ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake and explored the amazing world of mycelium and fungi. ‘AboveBelow’ was a mixed media installation with large cyanotypes of the ways different mycelium grow to seek nutrients, a cluster of 3D printed fungi on soil and video. With this I aimed to bring the hidden world of mycelium out into the light for all to experience.

I am continuing to work with mycelium including growing it in substrate in moulds.

ali

Ali Matthews
, Manchester, UK

“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.” - JOHN CAGE, 1954

I am an American artist living and working in the UK. I work across performance, music and video and have toured work to theatres, galleries and club spaces across the UK & Europe. The pandemic, in tandem with the climate crisis, has made us awake from our normal Anthropocene coma and come alive to the natural world and its many languages. While plants and animals usually get all the glory, fungi are the neglected third kingdom on earth. They share DNA with us and provide solutions to many 21st century ills - cleaning up oil spills, healing our brains from depression, providing protein alternatives and showing us how forests operate. They turn us on to the cycles of birth and decay occurring under our feet. Indeed, mushrooms mirror Anthropocene ruin back to us – they grow in ‘edge places’ and against all odds. This residency coincides with a period of artistic research leave for me focusing on creating a new show about fungi and interviewing mycologists, and as such it comes at a perfect time.

mycomaria

Maria L Schechter, Carmel, Indiana

T6DH stands for The Six Directions of Healing. An accident provided me an opportunity to explore my inner architecture. I looked to the natural world to aid my healing process. The use of 6 healing modalities, which include diet, complementary, alternative, and integrative approaches to health offered me a second chance at life. In addition to the many surgeries on my arms and hands, I looked to the natural world for alternative remedies in relieving pain. Utilizing natural properties found in the plant and fungi kingdoms, such as turning to a more conscious diet, utilizing teas such as reishi and turkey tail mushrooms, and shifting to a more responsible worldview provided a radical recovery in health and wellbeing. The experience offered me the opportunity to ask how can I be more fully alive, and how can I show gratitude for the offerings of the plant and fungi kingdoms who have aided my recovery? In a recent discussion hosted online by Orion Magazine and Yale School of Forestry: "The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Kathleen Dean Moore and Alison Hawthorne Deming,” I learned all creations share the urge to live. They hold an urgency to protect the plants, animals, and environment which continue to provide us with its generous offerings. Understanding that we are all a part of something much larger than human life is how I find reverence for the natural world at the centerpiece of each work I now create.

val

Val Smets, Brussels, Belgium

Val Smets’ practice is positioned between painting, installation, sculpture, and sensory intervention, often combining painting with light installation, site-specific settings, and smell. Her works reflect on the artist’s deep engagement with painting through a multitude of technics,
and her theoretical exploration of the position of humans towards non-human agency through the paradigm of mycelium and fungi.

Her simple treatment of the canvas and the absence of stretchers in her large-scale paintings highlight the materiality of the medium while underlining the artist’s engagement with the ongoing discourse on the traditional presentation of painting, further breaking the confines of the genre. Her direct application of paint on the canvas without preparatory sketches speaks to the remarkable confidence of Smets’ gesture, as her fluid lines and light brushstrokes form colorful landscapes of oversized mushrooms through seemingly abstracted forms.

By playing with scale and proportions Smets is repositioning the viewer as the smallest entity
of the scene, evoking questions of perspective as she morphs our familiar gaze on nature. The work allows the viewer to see the world through an ant’s perspective, highlighting one of the smallest (and biggest) groups within our planetary ecosystem: the mushroom.

Thinking through Merlin Sheldrake´s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures” Smets celebrates the incredible diversity of a lifeform that can pop up overnight, lives inside all of us and, and balances the paradox of new life and decay. Through her visual language, Smets creates a psychedelic new interpretation of Alice

mary

Mary Hegedus, Toronto, ON

I am a doctoral student at York University researching fungi, science, and visual culture. My interests centre around the knowledge we can gain from fungi. What can fungi teach us about film and media?

            For my master’s thesis at the University of Toronto I explored the parallels of the precarity and resilience of mushrooms and survivors in post-apocalyptic film. Fungi are the focus of my studies as I am interested in the fact that they represent things that exist in complex systems that humans don’t usually see.

            I am currently working on media representations of fungi and film specifically with respect to timelapse photography, Uexkull’s Umwelt theory and AI GAN modelling.

Phyllis
Phyllis Gordon, Scarborough, ON

My practice can be described as an observational engagement with the environment. Often my work begins outdoors, with taking time, being there, walking, drawing, and taking photographs. It then comes into the studio, where I draw, carve, collage, or work with pochoir or relief printmaking.

My reading of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled LIfe (2021) last summer was the catalyst for my mycophilia. Sheldrake’s chapter on lichens sparked my desire to understand lichens more and think about their significance, and their implications for life on the planet and beyond. I am in awe of their collaboration and convergence, and that they are “a gateway to the idea of symbiosis”. Rather than being in competition and conflict, the fungi and algae (and also innumerable other species) “sing a metabolic “song” that neither can sing in isolation”.  Lichens exemplify a strategy of life that achieves fundamental collaboration, a metaphor for doing together what cannot be done in isolation.  

From my home studio I have started drawing lichens, exploring the steady and slow coverage lichens achieve.
I have also made some reduction prints, seeking to convey their strength, translucence, and quiet bearing.  I have used both lichens and photographs of them as source material. So far I have been working on handmade Japanese papers that offer a depth and colour that echoes the surfaces where lichen congregate. 

My next step is to spend time in Ontario habitats of commonly recognized lichen, being with and observing the lichen.  Following this, I will try to convey something about lichen and this experience in my work.  My intuition at this point is that very slow movement will be a part of what is to be conveyed, somehow. Given my age and my very slow recovery from Long Covid, such imagery may speak personally to me and provide comfort.

Katherine Young, Atlanta, Georgia
https://katherineyoung.info/

The expressive noises and curious timbres of my electroacoustic music circulate via kinetic structures, as I engage notated compositional, improvisational, electronic, and installation practices. I take a process-oriented approach that prioritizes symbiotic modes of musicmaking and collective listening. Relationship building and collaborative ethics are central to my practice. The human and more-than-human ecologies that initiate, sustain, and produce the work become significant compositional materials and musical considerations.

The LAPhil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, and others have commissioned my music. My installation work has been commissioned by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. As a bassoonist and improviser, I amplify my instrument and employ a flexible electronics setup. I have documented my work on numerous recordings, including a duo with Anthony Braxton.

Recent significant collaborations include: Requiem: A White Wanderer (2019) created with Luftwerk using data gathered by glacioloist Douglas MacAyeal; BIOMES 4.0 (2021) created with Yarn/Wire and produced as a multi-part outdoor installation and performance piece at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, as well as the installation-performance piece boundarymind (2022) co-composed with Linda Jankowska and presented at 6018North in Chicago. I received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition to support my Mycorrhiza series for solo performers and electronics. I teach composition, improvisation, and electronic music at Emory University in Atlanta.

 

August 2022

Wildcraft

Ashlee maysAshlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Hooded merganser

Liz Guertin, Columbia, MD

My mission in life is to connect people to the outdoors. To foster that connection so that we may protect wild places. It's been the defining purpose in my work as an outdoor leader, teacher, activist, and now, as an artist. While I'm new to art, I am not new to the inspiration, or to the daily pursuit of wild experiences.

With respect to photography, I've spent the last year on a serious, daily effort to photograph birds in their natural surroundings. Learning about light, bird behavior, songs, calls, aperture, shutter speed, and my own personal vision has given me a new perspective on the natural world. And now, as my work turns more abstract, I’m focused on capturing the essence of birds and their habitat -- to present something others want to experience. My work is at its best when it contains a mix of the literal, the mysterious, and my wonder, all at the same time.

Building this project over the last year has been a life-force for me and my community. Through such a difficult time, we can find connection in the beauty of the wild things in our own backyards. I can't bring the people to wild places, so I bring the wild places to the people.

isobel

 

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

alyssa

Alyssa Roggow, Great Falls, Montana

When I was three, migrating monarchs came to rest on the linden tree in my parents’ backyard, and for a single magical afternoon the tree shimmered, a black-and-orange kaleidoscope of butterflies. I spent the rest of my childhood waiting for them to return.

Migration is a normal part of life for a monarch, but I was overcome with wonderment and grief at the brief transformation of my familiar surroundings. My work as a musician, writer, and composer arises from a deep awe of unexpected encounters with “the Other”, and seeks to honor the vivid emotions and sensory experiences that arise in such moments. I am inspired by natural systems and phenomena, and my creative process continually morphs to meet the environments, materials, and subjects of the work on their own terms, so I can listen more closely to what they are trying to say.

jeff

 

Jeff Mann, Montreal, Canada

Working across drawing, animation, video, textiles, and ceramics, Jeff Mann’s work engages with notions and feelings of sensuality, movement, and abstraction - seeking to convey that which is beyond purely immanent experience and understanding. Inspired by various historical sources of
symbols and symbolic thinking, his work abstracts images of nature, the body, light, colour, and geometric forms into compositions and films that are aesthetically numinous and spiritually yearning.

Each project starts with a spontaneous feeling, desire, gesture, or image that is then investigated and improvised upon throughout the process of making. Mann is attracted to natural foraging practices. Making his own inks, dyes, and photo developers from foraged plants, and searching the landscape for video footage and field recordings for his film collages, he sees working with natural materials a form of communion with nature. Through his work, he refers to subjects like the projective growth patterns of plants, sensory systems of flora and fauna, various historical theories of colour, and a sense of connection with the more-than-human world. His work is an invitation to explore a worldview of interconnection between nature, spirit, and the body.

Annie


Annie Thibault, Gatineu, Quebec

Inspired by an aesthetic in wich art, science, and nature overlap, her multi-disciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. By making use of the tools and technical resources of biological research laboratories and learning centres, she embraces organic matter itself as an artistic material, distilling it into a universe imbued with mystery. Her interest for the underground growth networks of mushrooms as interconnected ecological systems has led her to create works that in some ways question, both scientifically and artistically, the sensitivity of non-human life forms and the resilience of nature.

ouy

Meg Nicks, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me. Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

mycomaria
Maria L Schechter
, Carmel, Indiana

T6DH stands for The Six Directions of Healing. An accident provided me an opportunity to explore my inner architecture. I looked to the natural world to aid my healing process. The use of 6 healing modalities, which include diet, complementary, alternative, and integrative approaches to health offered me a second chance at life. In addition to the many surgeries on my arms and hands, I looked to the natural world for alternative remedies in relieving pain. Utilizing natural properties found in the plant and fungi kingdoms, such as turning to a more conscious diet, utilizing teas such as reishi and turkey tail mushrooms, and shifting to a more responsible worldview provided a radical recovery in health and wellbeing. The experience offered me the opportunity to ask how can I be more fully alive, and how can I show gratitude for the offerings of the plant and fungi kingdoms who have aided my recovery? In a recent discussion hosted online by Orion Magazine and Yale School of Forestry: "The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Kathleen Dean Moore and Alison Hawthorne Deming,” I learned all creations share the urge to live. They hold an urgency to protect the plants, animals, and environment which continue to provide us with its generous offerings. Understanding that we are all a part of something much larger than human life is how I find reverence for the natural world at the centerpiece of each work I now create.

July 2022

symbiosis

Ashlee maysAshlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

eric

 

Eric Millikin, Richmond, VA

21% of Americans believe in witches. 33% of Americans believe alien spacecraft have visited Earth. Myself? I believe witches and UFOs are actually the same thing, but I’m not sure I still believe in my fellow Americans. My new media artwork explores the intersections of advanced technology, American society, dark humor, and occult practices. I use techniques like biological art, artificial intelligence, video projection mapping, and vegetative tissue culture cloning to address my research into topics like species extinction, global climate change, and economic injustice. Currently based in Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia, I come from a working-class family, growing up in a mobile home in the woods of rural Michigan. I am a first-generation
college student who earned my BFA from Michigan State University and my MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. I am currently an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, where I teach 3D Computer Art and Augmented Reality. My artwork has been featured in WIRED, USA Today, and The New York Times. My work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, and the Festival and Congress Centre in Varna, Bulgaria. I bring a wide range of experiences to my work, including as a human anatomy lab technician, alternative visual journalist, and descendant of Salem Witch Trial victims.


Mary Abma
, Bright's Grove, Ontarioff
Mary Abma is a versatile artist who specializes in community-engaged artworks and environmental art. Always up for new challenges, Mary seeks constantly to push the edges of her practice and to learn new skills and information. Her artworks, which consist primarily of idea-based works executed in a variety of artistic forms, explore the theme of “place”. Her work embraces her interest in history, her concern for the environment, her passion for science, and her desire to find visual expression for her insights into the living world and the interconnectedness of systems. Mary’s recent works explore the systems of language and communication within the natural world.

fenna

 

Fenna Kosfeld, London, United Kingdom

How can we find empathy for the things around us? How can art function as a tool to generate a consciousness that makes us care and appreciate our environment? How can we make sense of our being and acting on this planet?

Those questions are guiding and following me throughout my practice, while I am looking at them from different speculative or material-based processes.

In my practice I am influenced by different activities and methods that build my research and process outcome. On the one hand, observation and research of natural phenomena are key for me to trigger a sense of wonder, which is the base for an ecological and ethical appreciation. By experimenting with various materials through different methods such as microscoping, assembling or photography and editing, I want to overcome `the natural restriction of my human perception, to explore multiple angles, perspectives and levels of material and things (living and non-living), that I would otherwise not be able to recognise and appreciate.

At the same time, material exploration inspires me to create functional light objects that put the aesthetics of nature into a lived and experienced context. Light is the giver of presence and without it there would not be any life, or science, or art. Hence, shining light on something physically and metaphorically, is what makes us aware, makes us appreciate and consequently act within this world
alyssa

 

Alyssa Roggow, Great Falls, Montana

When I was three, migrating monarchs came to rest on the linden tree in my parents’ backyard, and for a single magical afternoon the tree shimmered, a black-and-orange kaleidoscope of butterflies. I spent the rest of my childhood waiting for them to return.

Migration is a normal part of life for a monarch, but I was overcome with wonderment and grief at the brief transformation of my familiar surroundings. My work as a musician, writer, and composer arises from a deep awe of unexpected encounters with “the Other”, and seeks to honor the vivid emotions and sensory experiences that arise in such moments. I am inspired by natural systems and phenomena, and my creative process continually morphs to meet the environments, materials, and subjects of the work on their own terms, so I can listen more closely to what they are trying to say.

ddd

Sha’Tuon Simpson, Las Vegas, Nevada

I am creating work that explores my lived experience and emotions in a fem-queer-black body. Through physical and digital media including animation, video-projection, printmaking, ink, and clay; I personify various aspects of my thoughts as digestible stories to then selectively share with audiences. In working with a variety of media I am able to experiment with the idea of knowing myself. I incorporate themes and forms of nature within my work as a way to physically and mentally ground myself in space. I use plants as they're something that I've always been fond of and the natural world has taken care of me. In response to that, I also want to take care of it in return. As I experiment more with my practice I realize how taking care of things like plants has also helped me take care of myself. The materials and techniques I use draw from a place of comfort. I have a tendency to incorporate natural motifs and plant life within my work as both image and material. By incorporating these aspects I’m able to act upon the isolation made between artist and audience. My emotions and how I am as a person affect my artistry and vice versa. Ink has an immediacy to it that the process of ceramics and animation does not. That has always drawn me to it. My love of storytelling is strong enough to share it with others, and I'm willing to put myself in that spotlight for a second.

ddd

 

Leah Sobsey

I became a photographer because of the medium’s power to reveal—metaphorically and literally. My earliest memories of the darkroom are of those exhilarating moments when an image first floats into view, slowly revealing its mystery. This liminal space of emergence, between obscurity and exposure, is at the heart of my work as a visual artist.

mycomaria

 

Maria L Schechter, Carmel, Indiana

T6DH stands for The Six Directions of Healing. An accident provided me an opportunity to explore my inner architecture. I looked to the natural world to aid my healing process. The use of 6 healing modalities, which include diet, complementary, alternative, and integrative approaches to health offered me a second chance at life. In addition to the many surgeries on my arms and hands, I looked to the natural world for alternative remedies in relieving pain. Utilizing natural properties found in the plant and fungi kingdoms, such as turning to a more conscious diet, utilizing teas such as reishi and turkey tail mushrooms, and shifting to a more responsible worldview provided a radical recovery in health and wellbeing. The experience offered me the opportunity to ask how can I be more fully alive, and how can I show gratitude for the offerings of the plant and fungi kingdoms who have aided my recovery? In a recent discussion hosted online by Orion Magazine and Yale School of Forestry: "The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Kathleen Dean Moore and Alison Hawthorne Deming,” I learned all creations share the urge to live. They hold an urgency to protect the plants, animals, and environment which continue to provide us with its generous offerings. Understanding that we are all a part of something much larger than human life is how I find reverence for the natural world at the centerpiece of each work I now create.

 

June 2022

submerge

kate

Katie Hart Potapoff

Katie Hart Potapoff (She/Her) engages in a non-hierarchical approach through an interdisciplinary practice, working intuitively across processes and mediums such as drawing, installation, creative writing, fibre art, printmaking, metal casting, and clay sculpting. At the centre of her practice research is an exploration of the space in-between. She sees the creative process as an on-going and reciprocal dialogue; a liminal space of possibility to exchange ideas, shift perceptions, an invitation to inhabit a space that remains undefined.

Inspired by ideas of gathering, Potapoff’s recent work with fibre is an exploration into Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which borrows from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first ‘cultural tool’ was a gathering bag rather than a weapon. The organic fibre forms provide shallow depressions, pockets to hold gathered treasures. Some are empty, simply holding space, others enclose gold-leafed seeds.

Katie is currently completing her practice-led PhD at DJCAD, University of Dundee. She was recently awarded an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to fund her residency on the Isle of Iona. Her website is www.katiehartpotapoff.com and she is on Instagram @hartofkatie

cally

 

Cally Nurse, Newburgh Cupar, Scotland

I am obsessed with all things inter-tidal. For my recent Fine Art Masters at the University of Dundee I experimented with washed-up seaweed. Everyday and overlooked, I discovered that it is an extraordinary material. Neither plant nor animal, it is tough enough to stand up to crashing waves yet when dry it is sensitive to the slightest change in humidity. There are over 650 species around the UK coast and the increasingly warm sea is resulting in different species appearing.

People who have handled my seaweed creations describe them as 'intriguing', 'beautiful' and 'wonderful'. I make wearable pieces and sculptures by electroforming seaweed in copper, highlighting its intricate and varied shape and structure, transforming the ordinary to extraordinary.

Seaweed is one of the millions of companion species on the planet we need to engage with differently as a mode of collaborative survival. Wearing or displaying a piece of Sea Tang creates a direct connection to the diversity of marine life that thrives in the inter-tidal.

ff

 

Hannah Rowan, London, UK

Hannah Rowan’s work explores the slippery complexities of water that draws together a liquid relationship between the human body and geological and ecological systems. She uses a range of media including sculpture, installation, performance, sound and video to explore the uncertain form of materials. She is informed by embodied research in remote environments such as the Atacama Desert and High Arctic. She is interested in exploring notions of bodies of water, vessels, animacy of matter and the temporal transformation of materials. Rowan is influenced by Hydrofeminist theory as a means for representing the interconnections of ecological systems, to chart the movement of water from the liveness of melting ice, across weather systems and within bodily fluids like sweat. Her work reflects on what it means to be intimately connected as Bodies of Water, layering a post-human feminist perspective on material science, embodiment and ecological collapse to challenge Anthropocentrism. She has an ongoing interest in working with submerged and embodied research methods, often working with hydrophones, tactile interactions and personal narrative, to understand water as a living archive. She has situated her research within the marginal ecosystem of mangroves, melting Arctic glaciers and fleeting interactions with water in the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert on Earth.

u

Miriam Sagan, Santa Fe

     I am a poet, not a naturalist, but my poetry often creates a “map” of a place, incorporating geography, geology, archeology, ecology, natural history, memory, and perception. I am interested in borders, what earthworks artist Robert Smithson calls “The Slurb,” the collision between the human made and the wild.
       I recently completed a book entitled “Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn.” It was published by Sherman Asher Press in fall, 2012. The seven places were the start of a journey to create a land-based or site-specific. poetry. It began in 2006,  as a writer-in-residence at Everglades National Park. The next place was THE LAND/An Art Site in Mountainair, New Mexico. I started with a long poem which then  result in a low-impact sculpture, a poetry pamphlet and postcard, and several lectures in galleries and academic settings. In 2009 I had a residency in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. This Petrified Forest residency led directly to the production of a poetry postcard series of Three Views of the Painted Desert, which I donated to the park.   

isobel


Isabel Winson-Sagan, Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

 

ouy

 

Meg Nicks, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me.
Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To
be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

dd

 

 

Wendy Parlow, Ottawa, Canada

The world is changing around us. Art is my vehicle to explore some of the major issues we face. It is also a way to engage with others into the discussion. In the early days of the pandemic my focus was on the detrimental impact of COVID19 on women. My current focus is water, in its many forms, and the various roles it plays in our life’s. 

 

beth

 

Beth Shepard, Ottawa, Ontario

I am an Ottawa-based visual artist working photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and painting. For over a decade I focused on the representation of animals in art, especially animals in the industrialized food production system.  With the pandemic, I shifted my attention to my immediate environment – the shores of the Ottawa River. I realized that the destructive impacts of the human species on nature are everywhere. 

I have an MA in Art History, a BA in Psychology and a BSc in Biology, which provide me a variety of tools and perspectives for carrying out my research-based art practice. I explore the ecocritical constructs of “landscape” and “nature,” reflecting on how art can both hide and reveal environmental truths. My intention is to overcome natural tendencies to euphemize or forget the damaging environmental impacts of extractive colonialism, urban development, overconsumption and waste, and our continued dependence on fossil fuels and novel entities polluting the biosystem.

Some recent projects include Littorally Speaking: A Coffee Table Book; Plastic Shores, a print series depicting dead shore birds; Shoreline Lost and Found, a time-lapse video with spoken text; waste plastic sculpture, and print studies of endangered local species, like eels and turtles, and paleo-extinction.

gail

Gail Bourgeois, Gatineau, Quebec

Five years ago, with an artist partner, I began working seasonally and in relation to bodies of waterwithin the bioregion of the Outaouais and Ottawa River watershed. We move from placeto place, listening to and learning from both the natural world and human activity. Through a feminist lens this practice shifts personal grief into agency. I am enthralled by the activity where water meets land. Shoreline encounters guide my thinking about how I might visually interpret these liminal places where rhizomes meet wildlife in the more-than-human complexity of natural systems.

 

ashey

 

Ashley Feagin, Battle Creek, Michigan

Ashley Feagin explores stories through photographs, installations, performances, and collaborations. Feagin’s work stems from an endless stream of internal questions. Feagin’s curiosities are filtered through her queer identity and Southern upbringing; she reimagines failure and questions all possibilities by embracing any medium that makes the most sense.

Currently, Feagin’s work is featured in a traveling two-person exhibition entitled “We Are Overwhelmed” featuring Feagin and artist Libby Rowe as they explore the dissolving walls between motherhood, their profession as caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, Feagin has presented lectures for the Society for Photographic Education at both their regional and national conferences. Feagin received her BA in Photography from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 2009 and received her MFA at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana in the spring of 2012. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Albion College in Albion, Michigan.

OWLS

tiff

 

Tiffany Deater, Fulton, NY

We live in a culture that thrives on drama and conflict; a barrier between the imagined and the real. This desire for social tension extends beyond the human, and we impose our ideologies onto the animals and environment around us.

We overlook quiet spaces and moments of stillness, forgetting what it means to simply exists as living beings.

My work is about reimagining our relationship with animals, the environment, and each other. Though my video works I seek to connect the viewer with other forms of life, sometimes journeying though their perspective seeking to answer the questions: how do we connect and empathize with other animals? What insight can we gain from their world?

mary

Mary Wilhelm, Tempe, Arizona 

My work is a modern Aesop’s fables, with stories and mythologies that encourage people to not only consider the complex relationships of animals, but also our relationships with each other. As an artist, I often delve into the deeply weird world of online forum discussions, current political events, human psychology, and various spiritual philosophies that influence the narratives of my work. I play the role of critical observer, contemplator, and commentator, my work not only being a way of digesting the world around me, but a way of sharing these thoughts with others.

Animals are the vehicle through which to speak about these observations. Each animal is specifically chosen due to certain biological characteristics or behaviors that I feel lend themselves to the narrative.. People often project their own ideals and psychology onto various animals as a way to understand themselves. Animals become a projection of human behavior; often flattened into a two dimensional avatar for our own projection.

rose
Rosemary Chalmers, London UK

My name's Rose and I'm a concept artist and illustrator specialising in Creature Design, Speculative Biology and SciArt. I'm also the creator and Course Leader of BA (Hons) Comic & Concept Art and MA Creature Design at Leeds Arts University. I live by a river with my husband and polydactyl cat. I enquire into worldbuilding and believability in creature design—exploring creature design methods, science/art collaboration, drawing as inquiry, human-animal relationships, and communication of these themes to wider audiences through interactive platforms. These themes are important and original because they are cross-disciplinary and aim to instil curiosity and concern for biodiversity.

My work has been featured in Speculative Biology zines, eco-educational board games, and I have exhibited alongside Creature Designers Terryl Whitlatch, Brynn Metheney, Kate Pfeilschiefter, and Iris Compiet as part of Creature Design: ex femina; an exhibition celebrating women in creature design and eco-feminist perspectives. I have a BA (Hons) Visual Communication (Illustration) with First Class Honours from
Birmingham City University, MA Concept Art for Games & Animation with Distinction from Teesside University, and I am currently studying MA Anthrozoology with University of Exeter.

Lucy
Lucy Rupert
, Toronto, Canada

My inspirations and artistic process as dance artist are deeply coloured by my naturalist parents: raising butterflies in our bathroom, rehabilitating hawks and owls in our garage, collecting samples of rare wildflower species.  I always have an eye on the relationship between humankind and nature.  Where does animal instinct meet the poetry of art and science? What can we discover by looking at it  through this prism?

The birth of my son has motivated me to find deeper roots for my art: how can it move through my community in a way that is visible, positive, engaging and inspiring for anyone? This is manifesting now in ideas clustered around physics, ecology and cosmology. How poetic naturalism (the natural laws and philosophies or stories we tell about them) translates into a visceral moving beast, how dance performance can cause all participants to resist cynicism, to consider and care more.

I am so inspired by the gorgeousness of human accomplishments. We are capable of such cleverness and ingenuity, surely we can solve and heal where we’ve damaged and neglected. I want to be part of that process, connecting ideas, sensations, filtering it through dynamic, imaginative bodies to offer some thought-provoking spark.

I don’t know if I’m doing that, yet, but I’m trying. After 20 years of making and dancing, there is so much more to learn.


Mutiny

Jane Mutiny, London UK

I grew up in Dorset, UK, and graduated from Falmouth College of Arts in 2007, after which I moved to east London. There, I became immersed in the street art scene, creating murals and artworks highlighting environmental, biodiversity and extinction issues. It was through these actions that I gained the moniker Mutiny. I work across a variety of scales and mediums from pencil drawings, ink and oil paintings, murals and street art, and more recently film. My work is inspired by the wild, human nature, poetry and mythology. I am also greatly interested in science and natural history, particularly birds, which I use to guide my creative work. Alongside my art practise, I sometimes give public talks and workshops on bird identification. With a history enmeshed in the visual dialogue associated with issues around endangered species, and a deep knowledge of the natural world, my work is refocusing on the mythical, poetic, social and political resonances that particular species have within
culture. My studies and creativity have recently turned to the ubiquitous Crow - and the visceral poetry of Ted Hughes which I discovered eighteen years ago, and remain inspired by today. I am always eager to continue learning everything I can about both my art practise and the natural world through networking, sharing and collaboration.

 

Squared Circle

 

Andrea Charise, Toronto, Canada

My ceramic forms are generous and substantial, deliberately working with curves, size, and texture to fully realize clay’s intrinsic abundance. My functional work often involves wheelthrown, iron-rich, cone 6 stoneware decorated with rustic, expressive lines and non-toxic, food safe glazes. My one-of-a-kind sculptural works explore more abstract, larger-scale, often coil-built forms, ornamented with innovative, experimental glaze formulas developed in conversation with each unique ceramic object. Both functional and sculptural works reflect my interest in emphatically textured, even weathered, surfaces: an aesthetic translation of my professional background in geriatrics, and a personal meditation on the inevitability of aging’s marks on bodies--flesh and clay alike.

The Squared Circle Clay is a medium that traverses seemingly opposite elements, states, and forms: be they liquid|solid, novel|ancient, fragility|endurance, constancy|volatility, or art|science. Long used as an alchemical symbol, the “squared circle” offers a fitting motif for my own understanding of ceramics practice, denoting the interplay of elemental materials in hightemperature conditions to produce extraordinary effects on clay and glaze. Its more personal resonances speak to my integration of creative practices with health research methods—often thought of as diametrically opposed or even incompatible worldviews—as well as my lifelong appreciation for professional wrestling. The wrestling ring (aka "the squared circle") provides contemporary inspiration for my functional and sculptural work. From my signature “Hardcore Pots” functional ware, which utilizes for surface decoration the iconic props of hardcore deathmatches like barbed wire, thumbtacks, and pizzacutters; to more conceptual engagements with the art of wrestling, as in the collectible “Busted Open” sculptural vessel series. Channelling the ancient classical association of Greco-Roman ceramics with wrestling’s aesthetic richness, my pottery debuts a fresh vision of clay’s infinite potential as a twenty-first century art and craft medium.

Annie

Annie Rapstoff, Oxfordshire, UK

I am an interdisciplinary artist, interested in the human condition and relationships with other beings in the widest sense of the word. I often work in response to the life of the land and am currently exploring the interrelationship and possibilities for dialogue between humans, birds and trees.

At present my concerns include possibilities of transformation and embodiment exploring the hidden depths of what is heard, felt and experienced through the often unnoticed. I ask questions regarding relationships between nature and humans influenced by animism, somatic practice, deep listening and phenomenology.

My practice includes performance, text, book art and stitch. Work can be collaborative, process-based or ephemeral, taking the form of instructions, events, performance for the camera and in situ, gestures, interventions, video and writing/language.

During lockdown in 2019, a discussion around mask wearing took traction. I became interested in the costume worn by the plague doctors. At the same time I was aware of the growing sound of bird song, accentuated by the reduction in traffic pollution and noise. I began making masks, extending their shape into elongated beaks, which I wore to experience new perspectives and interactions between human and bird bodies.

http://saharte.com/

 

Sahar Te, Toronto, Canada

I am a Toronto-based artist and writer. My practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and performance. With my work, I attempt to challenge common approaches to “original” content and look into how parallel contrasted realities often exist simultaneously. My interventions range from linguistics and semiotics, social dynamics and ethics, to media studies and oral histories. Through each project, I engage in sociological, geopolitical, and techno-political discourses to understand hegemony within different power structures.

As an Iran-born artist living and working in Canada, my experience with linguistic communication, and ideas of mistranslation became the basis of my long-term research practice revolving around alternative modes of translation, and the poetic potentialities of miscommunication. Through this engagement with linguistics and communication studies, I became increasingly interested in the musicality of language, and theatricality of social behavior. my experimentations with sound and performance, and collaborations with experimental musicians, programmers and performers continue to inform my research practice and act as a major source of inspiration to explore possibilities in each project.

Additionally, my interdisciplinary interest in literature, translation, sound, oral history, and theatre bring me to an audio-visual practice that involves performances, installations, and experimental texts in the fields of linguistics, theatre, and poetry. Recent examples of such publications include contributions to the Brooklyn Rail Magazine, Intermedialites Journal, Canadian Art Magazine, and Imaginations Journal: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. My upcoming exhibitions in 2021 will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, CAFKA in Kitchener, and Visual Arts Centre of Clarington.

 

yula

Yula Kim, London, United Kingdom

My aim is to research the correspondence between the history of human use of birds for their cultural, political, and artistic developments and how these issues have raised the question of human idea of morality and emerge in this world. Also, I am interested in learning biological and ecological order of birds to state their significant roles in our cultural developments in the world, and to conserve natural system in the world.

I am particularly interested in birds since birds narrate many parts of our histories of art and scientific discoveries. Their fascinated feathers always have been a subject of fashion to represent the elegance in many cultures across the world, and the numerous zoological and science typical inventions are also influenced by birds and their biological system. Says to be that John James Audubon’s realistic illustrations of American birds in his book Bird of America have provoked numerous scientists who were interested in discover new scientific orders including Darwin’s Evolution Theory. On the other hand, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring refers the environmental problems through numerous birds examples to state the importance of animals and the natural ecological orders in human life.

I have lived in 4 continents and 4 countries (South Korea,
Hawaii, Uganda and the UK) over my life. And therefore, I have
been advantaged of seeing and having an experience of different
natural environments and different birds in their places.
During my lifetime in Hawai'i in 2017 and the research trip to
Scotland since 2019, I have discovered that local birds have been
the subjects to be suffered due to their innate aesthetically appearances in both areas. On the other hand, the dramatic changes of nature-mostly climate changes and human affection on the nature such as plant of trees in the grassland- in their regions also affect their living system and their biological orders of living in their given habitants. This lead me to consider the ultimate relationship between humans and nature and how humans have treated nature historically.

 

 
Sensation

Alyssa

Alyssa Ellis, Alberta
Biophilium Expedition Leader

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

Bohie Palecek


Bohie Palecek
, Braidwood, NSW Australia

Bohie Palecek is inspired by nature at a micro-level and uses the natural world as a metaphor for her personal experiences. Her narrative-driven artworks are inherently innocent, as if seen through the eyes of an empathetic child with a curious nature. They toy with a dichotomy between the safety of home and the wildness beyond; the known and the unknown. As her femininity breaks free of domestication her courage takes her into the motherly arms of the natural world, welcoming her back to the strength and support of her female ancestors. Opposing this connection is an inherently threatening force with malicious intent, the product of a child brought up with off-the-grid parents who retreated from the intrinsically man made threats of Y2K, identity theft, world wars and food shortages. This lack of security creates the yang to the curious child’s yin, often resulting in shadowy themes being presented in misleadingly bright and cheerful colours.

 

Mirinda

 

Mirinda Davies, Miami, Australia

Merinda (b.1991) is an artist using performance, movement, installation and conversation to ask how we might reorient ourselves towards deeper care and intimacy. Her work is inspired by the environment, human and more-than-human social and ecological structures and the possibilities available to us in future imaginings. Her practice aims to find clarity and connection in the external world through deep listening, observation, and research into the emotional and physical states in our internal worlds. She grew up in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW, and is currently living and creating on the land of the Yugambeh language group, in South East QLD. Merinda's solo and collaborative work has most recently been commissioned by; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane & Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (Imprints, 2020/2021), Outerspace (Umwelt Collective: m0ther.online, 2020), The Walls (Take your pleasure seriously, 2020, MIAMI/MIAMI international residency), Placemakers* GC (Fully Automated Human Touch, 2020) and City of Gold Coast (Conversations with the Forest, ongoing).

The work she is currently deeply embedded in is ‘Conversations with the Forest’ which is a living, breathing and growing artwork unfurling over time for future generations. This project explores interspecies communications and how we might create a world where plants are our equals.

 

Desiree

 

Desiree Nault, Calgary, Alberta

Before the pandemic I made art to wrestle with, very broadly, hegemony. The domination of a diverse society by a ruling class that makes everyone a participant of the dominant ideology until it is perceived as natural or inevitable. How, contemporaneously, people who perceive themselves as individuals with agency inevitably keep reproducing the dominate culture, what was once enforced is not now self-perpetuated. As an example, in a previous work, I organized a group of rec league players and artists to re-enact two NHL hockey fights in order to understand our bodily interactions with Hegemony through the microcosm of organized sports. This project helped us examine what we already know, that all of our comradery, love, and the meaning of our lives is found at the location of arbitrary power and violence. I felt that, in the process of reconstructing these systems one might discover the secrets to emancipation.

After a year in the pandemic, accepting and negotiating state authority everyday, I can see that I will not find solutions in re-enacting what I consider to be problems. While these are still the central themes of my practice, going forward I want to turn to the solutions I think (and science, especially the field of epigenetics can back up) lie in all humans, animal, and plant bodies, in the capacities of their genetics, muscles, bones, and nervous systems to carry meaning, communicate, and harmonize in the present moment and across time.


Joanna

 

Joanna Grace, Portland, Oregon

Through my paintings I illuminate and expand the small world I see under the microscope. Studying botany and digging deeper into the world of science has inspired a recognition in the parallels of shapes and colors that exist between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. I choose to work mainly with oil paints to engage bright colors and varying textures that capture images we will never be able to see without the help of a secondary tool. As I am studying the microscopic points of botany, I begin to see the patterns in fluidity and life processes that extend through the space of overall existence: circular layers, no true empty space, movement that can make a solitary object look like it is bleeding into the air or existing at more than one point in that moment. I strive to enlarge the tiny world into images that encapsulate the constant natural chaos and symbiotic relationships that keep our senses attuned and our bodies breathing.

Hooded merganser
Liz Guertin, Columbia
, MD

My mission in life is to connect people to the outdoors. To foster that connection so that we may protect wild places. It's been the defining purpose in my work as an outdoor leader, teacher, activist, and now, as an artist. While I'm new to art, I am not new to the inspiration, or to the daily pursuit of wild experiences.

With respect to photography, I've spent the last year on a serious, daily effort to photograph birds in their natural surroundings. Learning about light, bird behavior, songs, calls, aperture, shutter speed, and my own personal vision has given me a new perspective on the natural world. And now, as my work turns more abstract, I’m focused on capturing the essence of birds and their habitat -- to present something others want to experience. My work is at its best when it contains a mix of the literal, the mysterious, and my wonder, all at the same time.

Building this project over the last year has been a life-force for me and my community. Through such a difficult time, we can find connection in the beauty of the wild things in our own backyards. I can't bring the people to wild places, so I bring the wild places to the people.

Felicity

 

Felicity Cocuzzoli, Medowie NSW Australia

I am a woman, mother, grandmother, a proud descendent of the Wiradjuri nation in NSW, Australia. I am also an artist/practitioner/researcher, committed to promoting human flourishing through the arts. At eight years old, my first experience of flight bore me to my father’s posting in south-east Asia. Here, a tacit understanding that my sense of belonging was entwined to relationships beyond physical and human space surfaced. I did not yet know that my father’s Aboriginality was invisibilised by politics of assimilation and denial, that his family’s safety and acceptance rested securely in their recognised northern Irish-ness. In reclaiming my relationship with these silenced narratives, my adult self recognises that the deepest roots of my belonging resonate as embodied connections to knowing and being in ways that are perplexing and profound.

Coming to trust in ever-present ‘gut’ feelings as deep ways of knowing. Feeling the presence of evanescent and natural beings and understanding that messages can be carried by other-than-human forms.

It is through art-making that I intuitively claim my heritage and speak phenomenologically to fascination of human diversity and my connection to country. As an artist, I am increasingly compelled to illuminate the sensation/al and to give voice to our other-than-human connectedness.

 

 

kyuf

Amanda Besl, Buffalo, NY

I am interested in the arbitrary curation of gardening and the warfare that ensues from these choices. Frothing bubbles fade to reveal porcelain rose petals macerated and mangled by the bejeweled and ethereal bobbing corpses of drowning Japanese beetles. They tread water in the murky deathtrap of a liquid measuring cup, suggested by the round panel of the oil painting that straddles simultaneous attraction and repulsion, hyperrealism and abstraction. This duality causes both rational and irrational distinctions and subconscious prejudices to bob to the surface of our awareness. Beautiful and repulsive they exist together for a liminal time, a slow read that can’t be unread.

My process began while tending my own garden and escorting these beautiful marauders to their soapy tomb. This work is a departure from early work exploring botanical debris visible through the translucent ‘skin’ of plastic yard waste bags. I liken these paintings to America’s current turbulent political climate, in which distinctions become lost in confusion and distortion.

 

Mortem 2021

iug

Ashley Czajkowski, Arizona

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.


arave

Jennifer Arave, Minneapolis, MN

I am discovering that the primary emphasis of my dance/movement career over the past 10-15 years has been grounded in the ability/disability to interface and build connections with others.  I have zeroed in on systems and sometimes entities that connect/disconnect and even mislead to create disconnections through confusion -- be it political, or philosophical or interpersonal in nature. Many man-made systems that are meant to connect have ultimately confused, obfuscated and blown-up rather than the well-intended connection as purported. This translate ironically, into a perception of isolation, from others and within the individual. Among the systems, technology has often been the object of disdain and the brunt of the critical humor in my work.

I work in dance because of its ability to be a substantial connector including dancers, somatic practitioners, and other living beings; wordless movement that bridges gaps, brings clarity and a sense of completion as verbal language is removed. A somatic practice can detangle snags and confusions and a dependency on a verbal language system. This is also true for the movement education modalities I have chosen to invest my time in. Open Source Forms and Body-Mind Centering have opened deep channels into inter-body communication; wordless pathways that become a bridge not only in human to human interaction, but also perhaps connections in shared consciousnesses, human or other-wise.

Nayla
Nayla Dabaji
, Montreal, Canada

I have lived in Cameroun, France, Lebanon and Quebec. Travel and migration have been a large part of my life and this has had a strong impact on my artistic practice. Like documented journeys, my visual art installations and videos pieces tend to be very explorative, meditative and my approach to context and research is deeply influenced by the people and places around me. I am fascinated by traces, those that I discover by chance and collect in my daily life (images and sounds recorded while I am walking) as well as those that I reconstruct/re-enact in my studio (objects, paintings, writings) or come back to (personal archive and found footage). My collections of traces are fragments of experiences that I de-contextualize and re-use differently, allowing geographies and narratives to be juxtaposed and multi-layered. This dense combination makes concepts of time and space travel within my work, like the spontaneous, yet organized trajectories of migratory birds, like the strange sight of a never-ending road, or the liberating sound of waves repeatedly crashing on the shore.

Sonja

 

Sonia Halpern-Bazar, Montreal

Through sculpture, photography and poetry, my practice examines the notion of alien landscapes and how the body belongs to space. Historically, I have used copper in my sculptural work as a representation of the body and oxidation as the way the world affects the body. Recently my work has focused on rituals and performative gestures. PATHWAYS (the project I plan to use this residency as research for) uses the ecology of the cemetery and the act of bearing witness to mourning rituals in order to create cartographies that represent the convergence of these interests.

Jean

 

Jean Jamieson-Hanes, Kingston, Ontario

My mind is consumed by being surrounded by death, particularly the deaths of those deemed less important.

We often forget that we are animals, and that all animals are individuals. Almost everyone encounters unrecognized sites of grief throughout their daily lives; forgotten and faded bodies transitioning from life to death on asphalt. Countless lives are extinguished at the hands of humans every day, roadkilled animals being perhaps some of the most visually obvious yet the most often erased. We live, intrinsically intertwined in our shared emotional geographies, with non-human animals. Yet we often wish to omit them mentally from our field of impact, unwilling to emotionally invest in their lives and deaths.

I explore human-animal relationships, animal ethics, emotional geographies, feminist ethics of care, and mourning practices. My pieces look at the moral obligations we may have towards animals through the lens of journaled encounters with roadkilled animals. Using juiced fruits and vegetables, I create a stain across raw canvas that echoes the blood stain left on asphalt long after a roadkilled animal has been forgotten. I am looking to deepen my practice by using menstrual blood as a staining material, more closely linking the sameness between myself and the deceased individuals seen by the side of the road

Bea

Bea Haines, Wiltshire, UK

Inspired by encounters between forensic science and the domestic environment, my work explores the human trace and the insight this gives into human desire, fear and mortality.  During a residency at Colart’s Lab, I collaborated with Chemists to develop art materials made of human ashes. The ash was transformed into paint to create ‘Jack’s Black’; an artwork that breaks down taboos surrounding death and encourages discourse on uses for the body post mortem.

As a multidisciplinary artist, subject matter often becomes art material. Past artworks are made of lime scale, fingerprint powder and blood. After the death of my grandmother, I inherited nine gall stones surgically removed from her body. Grotesque and mundane to the outsider, these became precious personal relics and the subject of a string of artworks. ‘Heavenly Bodies’ is a series of backlit scans created using an electron microscope. Through a process of appropriation, the tiny stones are transformed into large, beautiful meteorites glowing in a dark space.

Madyson

Madyson Ysasaga, Katy, TX

As a child, I was diagnosed with a life threatening respiratory illness. Eventually, a double lung transplant was going to be inevitable. Making the idea of death and dying never far from my mind. There was another side of transplantation that I did not consider when a transplant was still
an abstract course of action (organ donation). For me to get what I needed, someone was going to have to die.

While waiting for my transplant, I began seeing little relics tucked on the side of the road: crucifixes, flowers, and occasionally assorted personal objects. These remnants serve as a reminder and a memory of someone who had surely passed in the mundane passing of their
every day lives. A modern manifestation of a truth that has been violently suppressed, memento mori, which means “remember you must die.”

Registering to be an organ donor is an act of memento mori. It’s not about wanting to die, but a willingness, acknowledgement, and acceptance of death. No one has a say on whether or not they die. Yet, even in something as involuntary as death there is still a choice that can be made in our 21st century world: do you want register to be an organ donor?

rocio

 

Rocio Graham, Calgary

I have always been connected to the land and I find comfort working with nature in my art practice; this connects me to home and defines my identity. Inspired by artists like Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jan De Heem, and other Dutch still life masters; the garden is my muse.

Most of my work starts the moment I plant a seed and continues as I nurture it through the stages of maturity, flowering, and decay when it becomes soil for future plants. Mine is a labour intensive process that allows me to explore the landscape as a physical and mystical space where time and nature become my creative allies. I use organic materials that are methodically planned, nursed, and harvested according their aesthetic qualities for later use in my compositions; similar to how a painter uses pigments to create. From seed to harvest, to the creation of a still life, a year can pass. Allowing time to pass keeps me attuned to nature’s cycles. I have found many parallels between the landscape and my inner garden; an inner landscape that shifts and ebbs with the seasons.

Rocio Graham is a photographer currently based in Calgary. Born in Mexico, she emigrated to Canada in 2002, studying art at Emily Carr University and the Alberta University of the Arts (ACAD), where she recently obtained a Bachelor of Design in Photography. Her still lives are influenced by her cultural heritage, experiences as a woman and mother, trauma survivor and reflections on life cycles. She explores the landscape from a body engagement perspective where labour, mysticism, and temporality merge. Rocio was selected as a finalist in the Womankind photographers award in Australia. After graduation, she was nominated for the BMO 1st Art invitational competition and has received various scholarships and grants. She is currently a mentor for the ACADSA Hear/d Art Residency. She is represented by Christine Klassen Gallery.

 

Pei Xin Liu, Montreal

Multiculturalism has become a trendy word, like a hashtag on Instagram. Multicultural is a word used to describe things that are not singular. It is used in the context of inauthenticity. Juxtaposing Chinese elements such as floral fabrics, knotting techniques or even spices with universally familiar furniture objects such as tables, chairs, and cabinet, I want to express that, in the age of multiculturalism, identities are a combination
of singularities. They are pieces of past experiences that form a façade that only somewhat makes sense.

I am a female Chinese-born, Canadian artist. I use furniture as my medium to challenge, even, remind the viewer to question the authenticity of one’s identity. Furniture is familiar
to everyone. It exists unassumingly within our lives. I don’t need to physically sit in a chair in order to understand how a chair works. For that reason, as art objects, furniture is extremely inviting and believable. I want to challenge that. We are getting too comfortable with terms like multiculturalism, racism, and sexism. It is no longer enough to make people aware of the issue; it is time to make sure people know that no one is exemplified by issues such as racism and sexism. Through reinterpretation of classic furniture objects from the perspective of a Chinese Canadian woman, I want the audience to question the authenticity of these objects and reflect on their own cultural identities, are they singular? Can one word really identify them?

My work deals with being a Chinese-Canadian woman living in the western society. I am consistently inspired by my interactions with people and my nostalgia for a China that does not exist anymore. Through meticulous reflection on objects that I remember seeing while living in China, a combination of details can inspire an entirely new body of work, with each detail holding its own set of connotations. The creative process feels very much like a collage, which I see as analogous to how my identities are formed. Even though the process might be conflicting and confusing, the final piece is believable.

 

u

Miriam Sagan, Santa Fe

     I am a poet, not a naturalist, but my poetry often creates a “map” of a place, incorporating geography, geology, archeology, ecology, natural history, memory, and perception. I am interested in borders, what earthworks artist Robert Smithson calls “The Slurb,” the collision between the human made and the wild.

       I recently completed a book entitled “Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn.” It was published by Sherman Asher Press in fall, 2012. The seven places were the start of a journey to create a land-based or site-specific. poetry. It began in 2006,  as a writer-in-residence at Everglades National Park. The next place was THE LAND/An Art Site in Mountainair, New Mexico. I started with a long poem which then  result in a low-impact sculpture, a poetry pamphlet and postcard, and several lectures in galleries and academic settings. In 2009 I had a residency in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. This Petrified Forest residency led directly to the production of a poetry postcard series of Three Views of the Painted Desert, which I donated to the park.   

 

Infinitesimal

hgf

 

Shelly Smith, Seatle, Washington

My paintings are based on microscopic life I find in water samples taken from all over the world. My process includes collecting water samples, documenting the site locations, and observing the contents with a laboratory microscope. I work both from direct live observation as well as from a series of videos and pictures I record via my microscope camera.

The work I produce is inspired by the tradition of scientific illustration and popular decorative motifs. Done in pen and ink with gouache washes, the illustrated paintings reflect the protozoa, diatoms, algae, and other microscopic life that lives in abundance, hidden from the naked eye but a vital part of our living world. The jewel like beauty of microorganisms sparkles through in glistening colors and metallic sheen, with bold line work reflecting the outlines of these small creatures under a slide.

Sylvia

 

Sylvia Meillon, Montreal, QC

Sylvia Meillon is a visual artist based in Montreal, Canada. Her work draws on underlying patterns and structures from the natural world. In urban habitats that surround her and while travelling, she observes the minutiae of a natural environment. Her paintings stem from this direct, unmediated contact and grow through research and fantasy to become fully independent life-like visual ecosystems. Through playful abstract forms she probes the processes that shape our universe and highlights both the vulnerability and resilience that define it.
Sylvia Meillon holds a BFA from Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and Switzerland and features in private collections in several countries. She was recently artist in residence at the Convento de Mértola in Portugal, a research center dedicated to the study of art, ecology and biodiversity.

 

Lucy
Lucy Rupert
, Toronto

My inspirations and artistic process as dance artist are deeply coloured by my naturalist parents: raising butterflies in our bathroom, rehabilitating hawks and owls in our garage, collecting samples of rare wildflower species.  I always have an eye on the relationship between humankind and nature.  Where does animal instinct meet the poetry of art and science? What can we discover by looking at it  through this prism?

The birth of my son has motivated me to find deeper roots for my art: how can it move through my community in a way that is visible, positive, engaging and inspiring for anyone? This is manifesting now in ideas clustered around physics, ecology and cosmology. How poetic naturalism (the natural laws and philosophies or stories we tell about them) translates into a visceral moving beast, how dance performance can cause all participants to resist cynicism, to consider and care more.

I am so inspired by the gorgeousness of human accomplishments. We are capable of such cleverness and ingenuity, surely we can solve and heal where we’ve damaged and neglected. I want to be part of that process, connecting ideas, sensations, filtering it through dynamic, imaginative bodies to offer some thought-provoking spark.

I don’t know if I’m doing that, yet, but I’m trying. After 20 years of making and dancing, there is so much more to learn.

SHirley

Shirley Hamilton, Winona, MS 

I explore the external as well as the internal landscape of the earth as well as the body. The end product reveals much of the process of creation just as we ourselves reveal the process of our life. I reveal some things under layers while obscuring others. Maps of Mississippi and additional imagery are layered in my work as a reference to where I live and grew up as well as the journey I've taken through my life. My newest series explores the landscape of the Tallahatchie National Wildlife Refuge as well as my home. I have been researching ways to incorporate microscopic views of samples, particularly samples of the soil, water, and plant materials to include imagery of these as part of the layers of my paintings. Just as important as the process and layers of paint are, the mark making itself fascinates me. I want the mark to reveal as much as it can about the subject be it a person or even an abstract suggestion of an emotion. Through it all, art is an intuitive process for me. My art is an extension of me and the way I see the world around me.

 

Blossom
Linda Staiger
, Palmyra, VA

My work as an artist focuses on the connection between humans and nature, and more specifically the integration we can feel as living beings when we are in nature.  My participation in the outdoors includes kayaking, backpacking and gardening.  In my work, I try to capture those moments of beauty and mystery that I feel.  Because of my training, I am grounded in physical form and,  therefore, my work is in the genre of realism, attempting to direct the viewer’s attention onto the natural world in which they might be observing or participating in.    

My undergraduate work was in physiologic psychology, which focuses on the relationships between living structure and mechanisms and the sensing, feeling, actions and interactions of beings.  

I use a number of media, including print-making, drawing and ceramics, but primarily work as an oil painter. 

Allison Mcelroy
Allison McElroy
, Jacksonville, AL

Allison McElroy is a Professor of Art at Jacksonville State University. She received her M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. During her graduate studies, McElroy traveled to Lacoste, France where she studied on-site installation under Dr. Friedhelm Mennekes; renowned curator, professor and author. McElroy’s artistic interests lie in an exploration of ecosystems, natural processes and materials. Her research focuses on explorations of creating with everyday materials such as dirt and spiderwebs, to push the boundaries of ‘high art’; that which is exhibited in museums. Her artistic techniques include: mixed media, sound recordings, and on site installations using native materials collected from the area. JSU provides McElroy with an outdoor classroom, to teach “Art and Science Observations”, and “Biodesign”, where students focus on merging art and science together in a way to bring awareness to contemporary environmental issues.

Iris

Iris Kiewiet
, Wakefiled, Qc

Iris Kiewiet, Dutch-Canadian artist, moved to Wakefield, Quebec from Rotterdam in 2006. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in The Netherlands.

With a BFA in illustration from the Arts Academy Minerva in Groningen, she drew editorials in the Dutch national newspaper, and for many other publishers.

Her contemporary style in drawing and painting feature colour and natural patterns in combination with human elements. What connects someone deeply to life is a recurring theme in her work.

Kiewiet paints and draws from her studio at PAF-FAS in Farrellton. She has worked with many community groups and offers art classes.

Laura

 

 Laura Ahola, Pocatello, ID

I pay close attention to the world around me, from politics to science, so that I am not only
prepared to respond in my work to issues but so I can differentiate in what demands my attention as an artist. Currently, I am responding to climate crisis. Extensive reading into geology, plant physiology, algae, history and climate science inform my body of work. Merging the ambiguous with scientific data results in layers upon layers of paint, metaphors and imagery in my work.

I am planning to be on sabbatical from my current teaching position at Idaho State University next Fall 2021. As part of my sabbatical, I have reached out to collaborate with two algae biologists. Both scientists have enthusiastically agreed to guide me through their research and work with me, my goal is to use my painting as a way to communicate their research. I have studied botany and plant physiology on my own and this research has been incorporated into my work.

 

Iri

Iri Berkleid, Paris, France

My life is a field of experimentation and my art is a tool of negotiation between my imaginary life and the exterior. From the conception to the physical production, I produce everything by hand. I organize, disorganize, shape, reshape, destroy, rebuild, displace, cut, mark, move, assemble and disassemble my pieces while maneuvering their constant transformation. As the primary matter of these objects remains the same, their various manifestations mimic the relational plasticity of our living world. Hence, they are marked by the visual codes of what is not visible to the naked eye - the living tissue that binds us all in this mysterious, microscopic and impermanent cellular danse.

Through this same game of relational plasticity, I transform myself as my physical works change. I am a metal worker welding in a metal factory one day, I am a filmmaker collaborating with actors and dancers another, painter or sculptor, costume designer or photograph, sociologist, biologist or psychoanalyst. The systems of all these disciplines are like processes machines shaping the primary matter of my work: dreams, visions, perceptions.

More than resolutions, my artworks offer potentialities of narratives and opportunities of representation, both generated by a fertile psychic activity.

sarah

 

Sarah Logan, Fort Bragg, CA

My sculptures are vessels for caching personal stories and establishing connections with the past and the future. I cherish the intimate details and still moments punctuating my busy existence, but their clarity can be fleeting. A weeping Calla Lilly outside my studio door, a decomposing whale swept up from the sea, the slowly eroding granite needles from my home in the Black Hills--these things feel like metaphors for experiences and reminiscences dulled by the passage of time. By creating mementos and souvenirs to document my experiences, I seek to give form to my memories, distilling them to their essence and preserving them against decay.

 

Camille

 

 

Camille Kravitzch, Basel, Switzerland

mycophilia
Katie

 

Katie St Clair, North Carolina

The natural world has always seemed to me extremely complex and impossible to truly comprehend. Lying on the forest floor, even the simplest forms and structures: a leaf, twig or mushroom is ripe with mystery. An alchemy is realized as the living world decays and transforms.  The layers of soil below us are in an earthly cosmic dance, one  where the whole composition is more important than any one functioning individual aspect.

 As an artist, I find myself in awe of the endless connections, the symbiotic and beneficial partnerships as well as the parasitic relationships, that are in constant flux. We are one organism in an impossibly complex web of being. My sight specific installations are spheres of made of locally collected refuse and natural pigment and ice. The spheres are hung above a canvas and melt. Eventually the water and pigment settle into large pools on the canvas that evaporate over time, leaving an inky crust of marks that result in a painting. 

 The installation exposes all the different stages of transformation in the painting process that viewers don’t normally see in a gallery. As opposed to my painting practice, the melting of the spheres is a natural act of painting without an artist’s hand. The normality of the roadside has been restructured to direct attention and heighten awareness to what is so commonly overlooked.

ytf

 

Melanie Fisher, Buffalo, New York

My sculptures are organic and otherworldly. With influences from nature and sci-fi, I build large forms that are new hybrids of species, with mixed characteristics from the plant and animal kingdom. By working in a range of scales and mediums, I explore the connections between our micro and macro worlds, imagining the opportunity to discover something previously unknown.

The details in my work focus on the relationship between interior and exterior space, drawing the viewer in for closer inspection. By leaving small anomalies in each piece, I invite the viewer to explore and discover something they’ve never seen. I am currently focusing on round, bulbous forms to reflect fertility, sometimes filling an interior space with hundreds of seeds.

anna


T.S. Anna
, Groningen, Netherlands

I and you are in a time where facts and opinions merge into new entities. Amidst a technologically charged present with wishful illusions of objectivity, fake news and deep fakes, I find myself - as many other contemporaries - in a joyfully desperate search for truth. Truth as something that is not known, something that happens rather than something to be found. This inquiry has an iterative nature and through it a growth of multiples takes place. Driven by a passion for the complexities of nature, my work seeks to invite the spectator to wander, discover and wonder.

Always and never the same to each other my works are the truth bearers, celebrating minuscule moments of change and paying tribute to chance having a chance. The works are rarely produced, rather growing over time. By doing so a truth continuously evolves. The series of sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and installations are witnesses to something that has happened, has been. An archive. Archiving is how I view my artistic endeavors, and each reveals one out of an set of multiplicities, a version in its own right. It is my greatest aspiration to engage you in a playful journey, to invite to wander and poke through the archives, to become part of it. I wish for you to take some seeds of my truth in your truth and to leave some of your truth to me in return.

 

Laura


Laura Erdman
, Calgary, Alberta

I am a visual artist living in Calgary, Alberta. I have a diploma in Environmental Assessment & Restoration from Lethbridge Community College. I love nature. Ever since I was a little girl and my grandmother took me hunting for prairie crocus in the coulees of the Old Man River I have
known the natural world as a place of solace and a source of happiness. I studied fine art at the university in that same valley and felt the lines of nature thrumming through my drawings of the human form. I felt I could never do her justice in my artwork so I went to the college to study her science. Now much later in life I am seeing these two passions come together. I am excited by the possibilities of creating art that is beautiful, expressive, and soulful but that is also scientific, and rich with information. I experience art-making as a means of discovery. My
artwork has always been in service to nature, now I hope to enrich those expressions with a greater scientific spirit of curiosity and discovery.

Iris

 

Iris Kiewiet, Wakefiled, Qc

Iris Kiewiet, Dutch-Canadian artist, moved to Wakefield, Quebec from Rotterdam in 2006. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in The Netherlands.

With a BFA in illustration from the Arts Academy Minerva in Groningen, she drew editorials in the Dutch national newspaper, and for many other publishers.

Her contemporary style in drawing and painting feature colour and natural patterns in combination with human elements. What connects someone deeply to life is a recurring theme in her work.

Kiewiet paints and draws from her studio at PAF-FAS in Farrellton. She has worked with many community groups and offers art classes.

Robyn


Robyn Crouch, Montreal

The imagery and symbols that come through Robyn's work encourage one's gaze inward to the cellular realms. There, one discovers playful depictions of chemical processes; they are the basis for the macrocosm, and our human consciousness becomes an interface between the seen and the unseen worlds.

In her functional ceramic work, the influence of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony encourages moments of contemplation. The viewer-participant can loose her or his train of thought while meandering through considerately composed collages of geometries, molecules, plants, and creatures, all woven together by strands of double-helical DNA. A flash of recognition. A momentary mirror.

A goal in this work is balance and harmony between the form, and the micro-mythologies encircling it. Moments of personal ritual in daily life beget even deeper, more conscious presence. Little by little over time we gain insight into what makes us tick.

Robyn’s goal is to provide a platform (however small), on which to rest, and off of which to launch forays into the luscious and potent realms of imagination, self-inquiry, and discovery during moments of solitude and engaged contemplation. So let us celebrate alone and together!

emma

 

Emma Pallay, Montreal

I am a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in printmaking and drawing. My love of nature and non-human animals influences my artistic practice. As I create my imagery, I feel I am mimicking the process of caring for a seedling, allowing the idea to grow as I work and letting the process assume some of the artistic license. I gain inspiration through encounters with the natural world. The markings in tree bark and the resilience of plant growth, for example, fuel many of my ideas. I have a strong connection to nature and animals and the act of re-creating them in my artistic practice allows me to feel a stronger bond to them. Oftentimes my work only hints at things from the natural world while remaining abstract. I allow myself to create pieces that range from abstraction, to figurative, to realism.

Annie


Annie Thibault, Gatineu, Quebec

Inspired by an aesthetic in wich art, science, and nature overlap, her multi-disciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. By making use of the tools and technical resources of biological research laboratories and learning centres, she embraces organic matter itself as an artistic material, distilling it into a universe imbued with mystery. Her interest for the underground growth networks of mushrooms as interconnected ecological systems has led her to create works that in some ways question, both scientifically and artistically, the sensitivity of non-human life forms and the resilience of nature.

Biophilia

t

Alison Neville
, Utah

Fungi, maps, and political events permeate most of my work. I find them to be bizarre and otherworldly. This being said I cannot understand enough about them. I wonder how they can be combined, what can be learned from them? Are there ways to bring out those things that intrigue me? I examine world events and try to dissect them into understandable pieces. I try to play the scientist. The small and common button mushroom, available at every super-market, becomes the map for a nebula only seen through the eye of the Hubble Space telescope. I use maps to interpret political fragments into the cross-stitches that I can carry with me. Adding little indications of this research to make roads and public buildings. Cordyceps spring up in new varieties that choose kitsch statuettes as their hosts.

Francine

 

Francine Dulong, Halifax, Nova Scotia

I am a physical theatre artist and vocal improviser with a burgeoning practice in sound and music composition. My participatory theatre company, Blooming Ludus, explores humanity’s connection to the planet. I am also a member of THAT! ensemble, a London UK based improv group that uses dance, theatre and movement to compose live vocal music.

KIm


Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Hyde Park, MA

Working primarily with 16mm film and non-diegetic sound, my artistic practice explores the tensions and contradictions found in the intimate relationships we form. From sexuality and touch to familial bonds and interpersonal dynamics, I seek to express my own shifting states between frames and allow for irreconcilable feelings to speak simultaneously.

My current work aims to connect me to land where my mother was born through deep ecological listening. The experiential knowledge of interspecies dynamics gathered from growing up on a coffee farm in Colombia was left behind with my family’s migration to the United States. Results from my current research have so far manifested in sculptural sound objects, animations and drawings that reflect on orchid deception, hummingbirds, and non-human experience of time to explore and puncture the illusion of a reigning, singular, human perception of the world.

kyuf

 

Amanda Besl, Buffalo, NY

I am interested in the arbitrary curation of gardening and the warfare that ensues from these choices. Frothing bubbles fade to reveal porcelain rose petals macerated and mangled by the bejeweled and ethereal bobbing corpses of drowning Japanese beetles. They tread water in the murky deathtrap of a liquid measuring cup, suggested by the round panel of the oil painting that straddles simultaneous attraction and repulsion, hyperrealism and abstraction. This duality causes both rational and irrational distinctions and subconscious prejudices to bob to the surface of our awareness. Beautiful and repulsive they exist together for a liminal time, a slow read that can’t be unread.

My process began while tending my own garden and escorting these beautiful marauders to their soapy tomb. This work is a departure from early work exploring botanical debris visible through the translucent ‘skin’ of plastic yard waste bags. I liken these paintings to America’s current turbulent political climate, in which distinctions become lost in confusion and distortion.

khg


Kate Houlne,
Indiana

Avian life has stood the test of time. A set of creatures evolved from the time of the dinosaurs. Yet, birds are in a cataclysmic decline around the world. Deforestation, chemical use, a changing climate and human made structures all take a toll on the bird population. These winged creatures do so much for the environment, from insect control, replanting of forests and pollination of plant life to providing recreation and spiritual guidance. They are not a menace to humans, yet how we live definitely is a menace to them. 

The separation of man from nature began long ago and the split continues today. This work aims to visualize the invisible threads that connect how humans affect the land and consequently the birds, whose loss, as an indicator species, is not only a loss of bird song, but the loss of human life as well.

pam
Pam Lostracco, Toronto

Pam Lostracco is a muralist and graphic designer in Toronto. Her work forms connections with the local environment to create a sense of identity and belonging for those who live and work there. By integrating unique and diverse natural, cultural and historical influences, she transforms blank walls into inclusive and welcoming spaces. Pam designs each mural with visual aesthetics
that are familiar to the community. It invites people to engage with and explore the mural, creating an uplifting and meaningful experience.

On the side, Pam experiments with making paint from natural pigments found in nature. After drawing a plant, the petals, leaves or fruit are collected from that plant, then ground up into a pulpy watercolour. The pigment is used to paint in the areas of the plant the pigment came from.

Pam is the originator of the Mountain Mural, which was featured on Apartment Therapy and Pinterest, which has inspired others to recreate it around the world. Her murals can be found in and around Toronto, British Columbia, and Marrakesh, in residences, businesses and institutions.

natasha

 

Natasha Lavdovsky, Jordan River, BC

Grounded in environmental research, my art practice untangles hidden connections between humans and natural systems. I am interested in the boundary between acts of care and acts of harm within human/nature relationships. My artistic interrogations operate between “collaboration with” and “manipulation of” non-human beings. With the intention of minimizing my involvement in capitalist systems my methodology embraces the limitations of environmental temporality, seasonality, and the agency of organic entities. Using mostly scavenged natural materials or found objects, my work brings what are usually disparate elements of the same system into unity. Through this union, I aim to highlight our interconnections to the ecologies that support domestic life in order to subvert the human/nature dualism that is at the basis of Western colonial culture. These artistic inquiries take the form of video, performance, textiles, sculpture, and installation projects. Currently, I am incorporating ecological principles or scientific archives into collaborative projects that work to critique the ways we understand and value lichens, a composite organism that is often overlooked and misunderstood.

Christine

 

Christine Atkinson, Los Angeles

We know that our institutions have failed us, that what we thought of as a reliable model, is not working and has not worked for many of us for a long time. The understanding of the landscape, of where nature resides and our place in it, is a flawed construct. The prevailing aesthetic of Los Angeles of palm trees, tropical and imported ornamental plants has little to do with the hundreds of plants that create the native ecosystem. We’ve created an urban environment that is totally dependent on imported water and human intervention, which neither connects us to Los Angeles as a place or supports the failing ecosystem.

Moving between sculpture, installation and photography, I use the materials of Los Angeles to piece together a sense of the city, both pre european occupation and manufactured. “for you and those you love” focuses on the gardens, both public and private, that are devoted to supporting the native ecosystem with the hope to prevent the collapse of the ecosystem.

In my works, dead giant bird of paradise leaves are painted in green epoxy to masquerade, as verdant, and ideal. While in contrast, the dead looking branches of the encelia californica sit dormant or burn red in the light filtered through wildfire smoke. Wildfire debris encased in epoxy and salt, acts as a time capsule of the drought, increasing temperatures and the misuse of water. Ultimately asking how do we inhabit, recalibrate, and affect our home landscape of Los Angeles, and what will be the impact of our actions? Are we here for ourselves alone?

Tiffany

Tiffany Deater, Fulton, NY

We live in a culture that thrives on drama and conflict; a barrier between the imagined and the real. This desire for social tension extends beyond the human, and we impose our ideologies onto the animals and environment around us.

We overlook quiet spaces and moments of stillness, forgetting what it means to simply exists as living beings.

My work is about reimagining our relationship with animals, the environment, and each other. Though my video works I seek to connect the viewer with other forms of life, sometimes journeying though their perspective seeking to answer the questions: how do we connect and empathize with other animals? What insight can we gain from their world?


arave

Jennifer Arave, Minneapolis, MN

I am discovering that the primary emphasis of my dance/movement career over the past 10-15 years has been grounded in the ability/disability to interface and build connections with others.  I have zeroed in on systems and sometimes entities that connect/disconnect and even mislead to create disconnections through confusion -- be it political, or philosophical or interpersonal in nature. Many man-made systems that are meant to connect have ultimately confused, obfuscated and blown-up rather than the well-intended connection as purported. This translate ironically, into a perception of isolation, from others and within the individual. Among the systems, technology has often been the object of disdain and the brunt of the critical humor in my work.

I work in dance because of its ability to be a substantial connector including dancers, somatic practitioners, and other living beings; wordless movement that bridges gaps, brings clarity and a sense of completion as verbal language is removed. A somatic practice can detangle snags and confusions and a dependency on a verbal language system. This is also true for the movement education modalities I have chosen to invest my time in. Open Source Forms and Body-Mind Centering have opened deep channels into inter-body communication; wordless pathways that become a bridge not only in human to human interaction, but also perhaps connections in shared consciousnesses, human or other-wise.

ouy

 

Meg Nicks, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.


 
gg

dawnDawn George, Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia

I work with film and video because movement and sound fascinate me. I’m interested in recording natural objects that have very minimal movements like a seed, a plant, an insect, or mold and then reveal how they communicate through subtle often time-lapsed movements. I develop ways to enhance the visuals through subtle animation, colour changes, and sound design. The films I create are rooted in environmentalism with subtle elements of science fiction.

When working with film I prefer to use eco-processing developers made from the plants I am filming to bring a multifaceted quality to the image. When I work digitally, I use editing techniques, masking, compositing, time-lapse photography, and computer animation to create subtle changes in the moving images. Audio design plays a large role in my practice. I prefer to source sounds found in nature or create my own sounds (usually from my kitchen) and then use audio editing programs to adjust a sound’s features to compliment the video.

Nature provides me with a sense of inspiration and peace, and I am always seeking ways to work with it and in it. I believe that nature holds universal truths and through careful observation, it speaks to us. Through these observations, I look for the connections that help me understand life on this planet and incorporate this into my work.

Allison Mcelroy

 

Allison McElroy, Jacksonville, AL

Allison McElroy is a Professor of Art at Jacksonville State University. She received her M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. During her graduate studies, McElroy traveled to Lacoste, France where she studied on-site installation under Dr. Friedhelm Mennekes; renowned curator, professor and author. McElroy’s artistic interests lie in an exploration of ecosystems, natural processes and materials. Her research focuses on explorations of creating with everyday materials such as dirt and spiderwebs, to push the boundaries of ‘high art’; that which is exhibited in museums. Her artistic techniques include: mixed media, sound recordings, and on site installations using native materials collected from the area. JSU provides McElroy with an outdoor classroom, to teach “Art and Science Observations”, and “Biodesign”, where students focus on merging art and science together in a way to bring awareness to contemporary environmental issues.

Emy St Laurent

 

Emy G. St-Laurent, Baie-Comeau, QC

Born in Baie-Comeau (Quebec), Emy G. St-Laurent majored in painting and  drawing in 2013 from Concordia University (Montreal). 

Her practice revolves around the unexpected relationships between organic  structures and man-made goods. She is fascinated by what socially classifies as worthy of  artistic depiction and hoards items that appeal to her personal aesthetics and symbolism.  Her compositions based off staged still lives and collages are assembled from sculptural  work, textiles, organic remains and other found materials. The busy paintings resulting from this pictorial research reminisce the artist's undying obsession with collecting  anything from fabrics, minerals and bones to naturalized insects and herbarium. Their  absurd and humoristic titles often guide the viewer towards the underlying subjects hidden  within the bizarre elements of the compositions. 

Since 2018, Emy lives and works back in her hometown as a member of Collectif de  la Dérive, a contemporary art collective. She is also involved in the administration of  L'Ouvre-Boîte Cuturel, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing a diversified cultural  offer on its territory.       

 

Lisa Matthias

 

Lisa Matthias, Spruce Grove, AB

My interdisciplinary artistic practice is driven by my environmentalism and scientific training. As an artist who is also an ecologist, I’m interested in work about our environmental footprint in the Anthropocene Epoch, including the different scales at which we can view our impacts. Printmaking is a field of study that I’ve been focused on for more than a decade. I’m inspired by many different kinds of visual artists, but for generating my own work, there is nothing to compare to the experimental and technical processes and aesthetic qualifies of print media. I’m primarily a printmaker, using a variety of traditional and experimental print media, but regularly use other media like sound recording and animation in my creative practice. Much of my practice has a strong element of hand‐made craftsmanship. However, technology is embedded in the process and work, and contributes to my conceptual explorations of technology as a way to see and care for the environment. My artwork reflects how the interdisciplinarity of contemporary art and ecology can offer a unique visual perspective.

Meggan

 

Meggan Joy Trobaugh, Seattle

Meggan Joy (Trobaugh) is an exhibiting fine art photographer and digital collage artist, who is currently located in Seattle, Washington. For the last few years, her work has focused on digitally combined flora and fauna, as well as various found objects, in a modern interpretation of a 16th-century painting technique by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The finished work being a woven web of details, isolated on a black background - forcing the viewer to soak up the shape vs. the familiar elements that created it, or vice versa, depending on how close they look. The work reveals a subject that could never exist in the real world, made of thousands of her own photographs. Sometimes taking up to two years to complete, the finished works have been well received internationally, and Meggan was awarded an Honorable Mention by the International Photography Awards for her winning entry, "Warmth" which was completed in 2016.

 

Mary Abma, Bright’s Grove, ONff

Mary Abma is a versatile artist who specializes in community-engaged artworks and environmental art. Always up for new challenges, Mary seeks constantly to push the edges of her practice and to learn new skills and information. Her artworks, which consist primarily of idea-based works executed in a variety of artistic forms, explore the theme of “place”. Her work embraces her interest in history, her concern for the environment, her passion for science, and her desire to find visual expression for her insights into the living world and the interconnectedness of systems. Mary’s recent works explore the systems of language and communication within the natural world.



Stephanie Hill

Stephanie Hill, Wakefield, QC 

I grew up in Cornwall Ontario Canada, spending summers at our cottage on the Saint Lawrence River surrounded by extended family and miles of life filled wetlands. It’s no coincidence that much of my work focuses on family and relationships, both with others and with the natural world. I graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and was privileged to partake in the college’s off-campus program in Florence, Italy. Inspired by Medieval and early Renaissance masters, my work uses symbols and mythologies to reveal a powerful and rich story. Painting is an emotional and intuitive experience for me and I often portray water, trees, flowers, animals, and insects to create a world where dreams, unconscious desires, and the divine come into play. I tend to work with oil on linen, yet also enjoy drawing on paper with watercolours, oil pastel, and pen and ink. I see my art as a deep expression of aliveness and transformation. I hope to bring those who encounter my work on a compelling and delightful journey of self-discovery that reveals the ever-changing dance between the world around us and the one within. I currently live in Wakefield, Quebec on the Gatineau River.

Doris Lamontagne

 

Doris Lamontagne, Ottawa, Canada

My art reflects on the interactions between beings in adjacent environments. It highlights the contrasts and similarities between beings and exposes the dynamism that emerges from these relationships. Whether ecological, geographical or cultural, my art makes an attempt to illustrate the dynamic nature of these worlds: attraction versus opposition.

In this series of five prints, I explore “panpsychism” which entails that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality. All things share these mental qualities: feeling, inner life, subjectivity, and perception. All things experience pleasure, pain, visual or auditory sensations, etc.

In my research, I investigate the possibility that one destiny of a being affects the destiny of all beings. Call it ecology, Gaia or holistic, everything is connected: the equilibrium between the forces of attraction and opposition keeps us breathing.

 

Germinate

Alyssa ellis


Alyssa Ellis, Calgary, Alberta
Expedition Leader

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

Blossom

 

Linda Staiger, Palmyra, VA

My work as an artist focuses on the connection between humans and nature, and more specifically the integration we can feel as living beings when we are in nature.  My participation in the outdoors includes kayaking, backpacking and gardening.  In my work, I try to capture those moments of beauty and mystery that I feel.  Because of my training, I am grounded in physical form and,  therefore, my work is in the genre of realism, attempting to direct the viewer’s attention onto the natural world in which they might be observing or participating in.    

My undergraduate work was in physiologic psychology, which focuses on the relationships between living structure and mechanisms and the sensing, feeling, actions and interactions of beings.  

I use a number of media, including print-making, drawing and ceramics, but primarily work as an oil painter. 

Laura

 

 Laura Ahola, Pocatello, ID

I pay close attention to the world around me, from politics to science, so that I am not only
prepared to respond in my work to issues but so I can differentiate in what demands my attention as an artist. Currently, I am responding to climate crisis. Extensive reading into geology, plant physiology, algae, history and climate science inform my body of work. Merging the ambiguous with scientific data results in layers upon layers of paint, metaphors and imagery in my work.

I am planning to be on sabbatical from my current teaching position at Idaho State University next Fall 2021. As part of my sabbatical, I have reached out to collaborate with two algae
biologists. Both scientists have enthusiastically agreed to guide me through their research and work with me, my goal is to use my painting as a way to communicate their research. I have studied botany and plant physiology on my own and this research has been incorporated into my work.

 

hgf

 

 

Sarah Nguyen, Columbia MO

Storytelling is central to this series of cut-fiber panels. The blade-cut, intricate compositions are mostly landscape based and feature symbolic motifs—flora, fauna, and an ever-­changing moon—to elicit childhood memories of myths, fables, and folklore. The large sheets are hung from the ceiling and away from the wall so that directed light casts strong shadows behind them, a nod to the flickering, fire-lit rituals of our paleo ancestors. Fiber cutting is a means of making drawing three- dimensional for the lacy panels entice us with their complexity and content.

kate

 

Katie Hart Potapoff

Katie Hart Potapoff (She/Her) engages in a non-hierarchical approach through an interdisciplinary practice, working intuitively across processes and mediums such as drawing, installation, creative writing, fibre art, printmaking, metal casting, and clay sculpting. At the centre of her practice research is an exploration of the space in-between. She sees the creative process as an on-going and reciprocal dialogue; a liminal space of possibility to exchange ideas, shift perceptions, an invitation to inhabit a space that remains undefined.

Inspired by ideas of gathering, Potapoff’s recent work with fibre is an exploration into Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which borrows from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first ‘cultural tool’ was a gathering bag rather than a weapon. The organic fibre forms provide shallow depressions, pockets to hold gathered treasures. Some are empty, simply holding space, others enclose gold-leafed seeds.

Katie is currently completing her practice-led PhD at DJCAD, University of Dundee. She was recently awarded an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to fund her residency on the Isle of Iona. Her website is www.katiehartpotapoff.com and she is on Instagram @hartofkatie

Stephanie Hill

 

Stephanie Hill, Wakefield, QC 

I grew up in Cornwall Ontario Canada, spending summers at our cottage on the Saint Lawrence River surrounded by extended family and miles of life filled wetlands. It’s no coincidence that much of my work focuses on family and relationships, both with others and with the natural world. I graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and was privileged to partake in the college’s off-campus program in Florence, Italy. Inspired by Medieval and early Renaissance masters, my work uses symbols and mythologies to reveal a powerful and rich story. Painting is an emotional and intuitive experience for me and I often portray water, trees, flowers, animals, and insects to create a world where dreams, unconscious desires, and the divine come into play. I tend to work with oil on linen, yet also enjoy drawing on paper with watercolours, oil pastel, and pen and ink. I see my art as a deep expression of aliveness and transformation. I hope to bring those who encounter my work on a compelling and delightful journey of self-discovery that reveals the ever-changing dance between the world around us and the one within. I currently live in Wakefield, Quebec on the Gatineau River.

hgf


Jenna Marks, Dartmouth NS

Having grown up in Nova Scotia, a region that is no more than an hour from the ocean in any direction, it is no surprise that Jenna Marks’ animated films are heavily influenced by her deep-rooted connection to water and nature. Her home’s rural seclusion, yet diverse social economy, gives her a vulnerable, honest and unique voice in Canadian cinema. Jenna’s influence from her time as a team Canada sprint canoeist is also present through imagery of liquid, her connection to her body and inner dialogue that comes from hours and hours of solitary training. No matter where she is in the world, Jenna finds a sense of “home” in the meditative touch of water beneath her.

isobel

 

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

 

 

 

hgf

 

Meggan Joy Trobaugh, Seattle

Meggan Joy (Trobaugh) is an emerging exhibiting fine art photographer and digital collage artist, who is currently located in Seattle, Washington. For the last few years, her work has focused on digitally combined flora and fauna, as well as various found objects, in a modern interpretation of a 16th-century painting technique by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The finished work being a woven web of details, isolated on a black background - forcing the viewer to soak up the shape vs. the familiar elements that created it, or vice versa, depending on how close they look. The work reveals a subject that could never exist in the real world, made of thousands of her own photographs. Sometimes taking up to two years to complete, the finished works have been well received internationally, and Meggan was awarded an Honorable Mention by the International Photography Awards for her winning entry, "Warmth" which was completed in 2016.

 
bird school

Ashlee mays

 

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN
Expedition Leader

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

 

vultures


Lucy Cleek
, Maryville, TN

I work mainly in printmaking and drawing. I’ve been an avid animal lover my entire life. I often depict critters I’ve become enamored with as a way to learn more about them. I like to research the life cycle and habitats of the animals I depict. I enjoy finding out weird quirks different species have and fun facts about them. My hope is that I can share the beauty I see in the natural world, even if the subject isn’t one people would normally consider attractive or worthy. Gastropods continue to be a source of wonder and inspiration for me. The more time I’ve spent in nature in recent years has rekindled a childhood love for birds. I have been learning more about identifying them and they have made their way into some prints. I love bright colors and how they can be used to evoke happy emotions. That being said, this past year I have attempted to make more single color prints as a challenge to myself to not rely so heavily on color. I mainly create linocuts, except the times I have access to lithography
equipment. Linoleum allows me to use color reductively, or create single color prints in a way that feels more natural than drawing. I believe everyone should be able to have art in their homes and printmaking also allows me to create affordable art.

Nancy Hart
Nancy Hart
, Odessa, TX

The influences for the current series of bird drawings and collages  include my school field trips to the Museum of Natural History in NYC, Audubon bird prints my parents had in our family house, and visits to national history museums in Italy and France.  I have also been looking at scientific illustrations from the past, such as those by Robert Hooke. Another influence is from the Arna artist residency program I attended at a bird sanctuary in Sweden. The works are in black and white to reinforce the sense of the past and to give the impression of being drawings from science books. 
 This series has birds juxtaposed with images of viruses and spores. I am exploring the relationship between art and abstract elements of microscopic images in science. The taxidermy birds are both real and artificial at the same time and the newest work now has both birds and virus images enlarged and functioning as nests/environments.  

Nayla


Nayla Dabaji
, Montreal, Canada

I have lived in Cameroun, France, Lebanon and Quebec. Travel and migration have been a large part of my life and this has had a strong impact on my artistic practice. Like documented journeys, my visual art installations and videos pieces tend to be very explorative, meditative and my approach to context and research is deeply influenced by the people and places around me. I am fascinated by traces, those that I discover by chance and collect in my daily life (images and sounds recorded while I am walking) as well as those that I reconstruct/re-enact in my studio (objects, paintings, writings) or come back to (personal archive and found footage). My collections of traces are fragments of experiences that I de-contextualize and re-use differently, allowing geographies and narratives to be juxtaposed and multi-layered. This dense combination makes concepts of time and space travel within my work, like the spontaneous, yet organized trajectories of migratory birds, like the strange sight of a never-ending road, or the liberating sound of waves repeatedly crashing on the shore.

 

Stephanie Hill

 

Stephanie Hill, Wakefield, QC 

I grew up in Cornwall Ontario Canada, spending summers at our cottage on the Saint Lawrence River surrounded by extended family and miles of life filled wetlands. It’s no coincidence that much of my work focuses on family and relationships, both with others and with the natural world. I graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and was privileged to partake in the college’s off-campus program in Florence, Italy. Inspired by Medieval and early Renaissance masters, my work uses symbols and mythologies to reveal a powerful and rich story. Painting is an emotional and intuitive experience for me and I often portray water, trees, flowers, animals, and insects to create a world where dreams, unconscious desires, and the divine come into play. I tend to work with oil on linen, yet also enjoy drawing on paper with watercolours, oil pastel, and pen and ink. I see my art as a deep expression of aliveness and transformation. I hope to bring those who encounter my work on a compelling and delightful journey of self-discovery that reveals the ever-changing dance between the world around us and the one within. I currently live in Wakefield, Quebec on the Gatineau River.

 

Hooded merganser
Liz Guertin, Columbia
, MD

My mission in life is to connect people to the outdoors. To foster that connection so that we may protect wild places. It's been the defining purpose in my work as an outdoor leader, teacher, activist, and now, as an artist. While I'm new to art, I am not new to the inspiration, or to the daily pursuit of wild experiences.

With respect to photography, I've spent the last year on a serious, daily effort to photograph birds in their natural surroundings. Learning about light, bird behavior, songs, calls, aperture, shutter speed, and my own personal vision has given me a new perspective on the natural world. And now, as my work turns more abstract, I’m focused on capturing the essence of birds and their habitat -- to present something others want to experience. My work is at its best when it contains a mix of the literal, the mysterious, and my wonder, all at the same time.

Building this project over the last year has been a life-force for me and my community. Through such a difficult time, we can find connection in the beauty of the wild things in our own backyards. I can't bring the people to wild places, so I bring the wild places to the people.

Temperance

Jodi Bonassi, Canoga Park, CA

My fascination with birds came out of an urgent need during the pandemic  to feel connected to nature and flight.  In the past, I had always studied people in places of communal exchange.  Due to the pandemic, I turned to nature to heal myself and others during this uncertain time in our history.  The Museum Of Art And History (MOAH) was thrilled in my new path and birds are now a focus of my work.  The birds will be on exhibit in February 2022. I want to go further. 

I have a strong desire to learn about the different bird species, the growing issues of their loss of habitat due to environmental and building and climate change,  so I can enhance my creative journey. Birds and nature have brought me a serenity, peace and new inspiration.  We must preserve our wildlife and create a safe place for our feathered friends.

 

Alexandra

 

 

Alexandra Desipris, Newark, NJ

Alexandra Desipris is a painter, sculptor, and researcher of Greek descent based out of Newark, NJ.  

Her work is about diaspora, displacement, loss, and death.  


2020

Mortem

iug

Ashley Czajkowski, Arizona

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.

Mia
Mia S. van Leeuwen
, Winnipeg, MB

In an increasingly secularized society, many of us no longer know how to perform rituals surrounding death and loss. As artists, we can understand how rituals and ceremony are created and how they function. Ritual provides a structure for, and formalizes emotional experience. Like a performance, rituals have a set sequence of actions involving words, objects and gestures that are performed in a significant order of revelation. Furthermore, artists are known to subvert the norms, imagine possible worlds, give voice to marginalized perspectives, offer alternative ways of seeing, and reframe contemporary discourse. Therefore, what can the artist contribute to the conversation and practices surrounding death, dying and memorial rites?

My current project How to Raise a Ghost? attends to this inquiry through a research-creation process. I am seeking multi-perspectivism on the subject by engaging in death studies research, philosophical reflection, and artistic expression. Research will be explored through performance, installation and photography as well as engaging with artists across the nation through a death survey that I am developing. The work ultimately seeks to connect with the greater community, using art to confront the inevitability of our death in a meaningful way.

Photo credit: Mia van Leeuwen / Karen Asher

Genna Howard

 

Genna Howard, Brooklyn, NY

Genna Howard is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and tattooer born and raised in Manhattan, New York. She pursues painting as a way to process emotions surrounding anxiety and mortality, and as a way to draw herself closer to understanding what it means to inhabit the world we live in.

Her influences come from natural history, death practices in different historical cultures, and a deep curiosity with how humans connect and interact with one another. Whether it’s an obsession with John James Audubon, a self-gathered library of symbology catalogues and cemetery imagery, or an expansive knowledge of American folk art and its intersections with tattoo history, Genna strives to link these various interests within her work, making art that speaks to her own experiences in an emotional and thought provoking way. 

eve

Eve Chartrand, Bainbridge Island, WA

My research creation investigates the nature of negative body representations associated with ageing, including narratives of inclusiveness and visibility outside normative constructs. Specifically, what are the implications to self-identity and agency of current negative body constructs in middle-aged women’s lives? How can we challenge the idea that ageing is intrinsically defined by disability, ontological decay, and death? How can materiality suggest a more compassionate and vibrant humanism prone to generating re-interpretations and re-considerations of aging negative bodies?

The “Saprotrophic Bodies and Holobionts” project was born from the need to communicate how older bodies are still sources of renewal, wonder, and agency; it promotes a “conjuncture of survival […] a state of renewal that combines with
the present” (Déry 2006) by putting lingering, blooming, corporeal, and embodied things in relationship to the living as a way of re-inscribing deviant body in social discourse.
Challenging discriminating stereotypes negating the fertile ground of ageing, its rich individuality, kinship and the uniqueness of its personal landscape, my work celebrates the unique role of embodied transformation and the encompassing generosity and ingenious, regenerative creativity of nature. Yet, I wish to draw attention to how life reveals itself in unexpected ways if we dare to look beyond what is superficially exposed and expected.

Generated by contemporary considerations of the human body and its kinship to the natural/material world, my work attempts to steer clear of considerations foreseeing the body as a mere product of cultural factors and claims its affiliation to an earthy embodiment. By recounting bodily experiences and phenomenological impressions of significant objects, I aim at redefining knowledge of fleshy bodies, transgressing amid known boundaries of representation thus suggesting a more encompassing view of the corporeal. I want to pursue studying how artistic transformative encounters, wherein underlying, unifying motifs evoke horror and frailty, also speak to common humaneness, solidarities, and shared vulnerabilities. While seeking expressions of materiality rather than representation, I want to explore further how a hybrid approach can serve as a tool for cultural and institutional critique and a conduit for creative commenting on the self in visual culture and propose to put forward all-encompassing views of rapidly shifting social perspectives affecting bodies and the environment. I wish to explore visual strategies that defied limited anthropomorphic views, assessments that might falsify or alter phenomenological experiences of nature and steer viewers away from a place of origin situated in the body.

Tiffany

 

Tiffany Deater, Fulton, NY

We live in a culture that thrives on drama and conflict; a barrier between the imagined and the real. This desire for social tension extends beyond the human, and we impose our ideologies onto the animals and environment around us.

We overlook quiet spaces and moments of stillness, forgetting what it means to simply exists as living beings.

My work is about reimagining our relationship with animals, the environment, and each other. Though my video works I seek to connect the viewer with other forms of life, sometimes journeying though their perspective seeking to answer the questions: how do we connect and empathize with other animals? What insight can we gain from their world?


Ava

Ava P Christl, Harrison Hot Springs, BC

My work, spanning over 30 years, lies at the intersection of art and ecology, nature and spirit. I make paintings about nature and place; nature as healer; and about our human relationships to the living land. My work deals with landscape and memory; grief, loss and recovery; longing and belonging; and the concept of entropy as it relates to land and water.

I now want to shift and deepen this work to include the human landscape; to work with people in all conditions; to address grief and loss on a human scale. I have recently studied to become a death doula, and have witnessed and mourned many deaths among family and friends in recent years including death by suicide. Now, I am interested in finding ways to bring my artwork into the realm of the dying and the dead. I want to shift ideas of grief, loss, and mourning from the ecological context to the human. I want more than prayer and ritual. I want a palpable, visible expression of death and dying - an art of mourning and honouring.

Mycophilia

uySuus Agnes Claessen, Holland

I am an author-illustrator and comics artist with a background in science communication, literary studies, and beekeeping. My work takes a particular interest in environmental ethics and the underdog. As a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sustainability, Otago University, New Zealand, I currently work on a graphic novel about human relationships with 'unloved' microcommunities of invertebrates, moss, and fungi. This is part of my interdisciplinary research that explores visual narrative as a method for cultivating attentiveness to nonhumans.

I look for ways to better coexist with my environments through different ways of knowing them —from folklore and myth to traditional and contemporary ecological knowledges— and let these stories colour my daily observations and actions, as I’m learning to read my surroundings intimately; perhaps even communicate with them. Who am I to them? Who responds to the seeds and spores I spread?

By engaging story and sense in processes of getting to know other beings, my creative practice seeks to bring them to wider cultural imaginations. It’s too easy to overlook or disregard them as backdrops to human life. By reviving forgotten wisdoms, I wish to contribute to a broader recognition of nonhumans in all shapes and sizes, not just for their importance and wondrousness, but also as life forms in their own rights, alive and aware, creatures full of story and for who things matter.

Lori Ono
Lori Ono
, Tokyo, Japan

Animals and plants get a lot of love. Fungi? Not so much. But yet mycology seems to be making its way into a larger cultural awareness. Fungi has a liminal quality of being subject, object and material. Fungus has been the subject of study in science and art.
Finding new ways to use fungus other than dyes and food products, artists and inventors are using mycelium for clothing, building, packaging and sculpture. The mycological renaissance has arrived.

We’re interconnected with fungus on a fundamental level. Examining these connections isa way to approach understanding the world. My work explores the shapes and forms ofmushrooms through photography and book arts. As I learn more about mycology, I create illustrated stories and zines to consolidate what I’ve learned and to share with others.

 

Carol

 

Carol Padberg, New York

My art is incorporated into my lifeways, my community and my livelihood as an educator. Like nested bowls, this creative practice telescopes in scale, moving from intimate interspecies works, to local projects, to international educational initiatives. The urgency of this time demands new forms of inquiry that synthesize poetry and pragmatism, wonder and action, generosity and courage. 

 

sophie

Sophie Rogers, London

In my practice, I use digital software including Cinema 4D to create simulations of imagined places and scenes often inspired by world-building practices found in sci-fi . I use digital processes such as Virtual Reality modelling, 3D printing and CGI animation to explore speculative worlds and imaginary landscapes. Science Fiction and speculative futures greatly influence my work, in particular, when considering the creation of other worlds. I am interested in the exploration of entangled human and world relations and the ways in which this entanglement becomes visible. Footage of sharks eating internet cables that lay under the sea and the wealth of marine life that has begun to grow on temporary oil rigs off the coast of Santa Barbara are examples of this. When looking at this messy, confusing entwinement, it evokes ideas of hybrid creatures and fictional ecosystems that would inhabit this ‘in between’ space. I am influenced by writers such as Donna Harraway, Ursula Le Guinn and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

Since graduating from Kingston University in 2014, I have exhibited at spaces such as The Barbican Centre, David Dale Gallery and at the opening of the Switch House, Tate Modern. In 2017 I participated in Masterclass, hosted by the Zabludowicz Collection. I have been commissioned by Hervisions, Art Night, Boiler Room, and most recently, Mansions of the Future based in Lincoln.

julie

Julia Knowlden, Canmore AB

I grew up in Canmore exploring the Rocky Mountains and playing in the woods. I worked as a landscaper in Nanaimo while attending University and was able to explore a lot of Vancouver Island. This continued connection to nature has made me a very spiritual person and a passionate environmentalist. Both these aspects of my personality are the main influence in my art.

I have always been captivated by mushrooms, and the more I explored the rainforest, the more I fell in love with fungi. Their role in the ecosystem is so important and unlike any other. I have been considering going back to school to study mycology and better understand their relationships. In the meantime, I am trying to capture their essence and show how magical and durable they are through my paintings. I want my work to tell a story with surreal elements while representing the fascinating reality. I would love to capture the relationships between fungi and plants. Mycophilia will help me further my education and continue this direction with my art.

 

AlisonAlison Mc Elroy, Jacksonville, AL

Allison McElroy is a Professor of Art at Jacksonville State University. She received her M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. During her graduate studies, McElroy traveled to Lacoste, France where she studied on-site installation under Dr. Friedhelm Mennekes; renowned curator, professor and author. McElroy’s artistic interests lie in an exploration of ecosystems, natural processes and materials. Her research focuses on explorations of creating with everyday materials such as dirt and spiderwebs, to push the boundaries of ‘high art’; that which is exhibited in museums. Her artistic techniques include: mixed media, sound recordings, and on site installations using native materials collected from the area. JSU provides McElroy with an outdoor classroom, to teach “Art and Science Observations”, and “Biodesign”, where students focus on merging art and science together in a way to bring awareness to contemporary environmental issues.

Mellissa
Mellissa Fisher, UK

I am a London based artist whose background stems from an interest in the interrelationships between fine art, illustration and science. My most recent works consist of a deep exploration of the connections between nature and the human body. I have been experimenting with using agar as a sculpting medium, producing bacterial portraits, which live and die, representing the ecosystem of the life cycle.

 I am currently studying a Masters Degree at Central Saint Martins, where I have just finished my first year. I have been exploring the wonders of nature and how growing cress seeds inside an agar sculpture can distort and reshape the original structure.

 I am keen to explore nature in more depth as I see my work heading that way in the future, my intention with the work is to engage with a wide audience, provoke thought, provoke emotion and discussion as well as enabling people to think about what is around them and what should be preserved for a better life. 

 
mycophilia

Katie

 

Katie St Clair, North Carolina

The natural world has always seemed to me extremely complex and impossible to truly comprehend. Lying on the forest floor, even the simplest forms and structures: a leaf, twig or mushroom is ripe with mystery. An alchemy is realized as the living world decays and transforms.  The layers of soil below us are in an earthly cosmic dance, one  where the whole composition is more important than any one functioning individual aspect.

 As an artist, I find myself in awe of the endless connections, the symbiotic and beneficial partnerships as well as the parasitic relationships, that are in constant flux. We are one organism in an impossibly complex web of being. My sight specific installations are spheres of made of locally collected refuse and natural pigment and ice. The spheres are hung above a canvas and melt. Eventually the water and pigment settle into large pools on the canvas that evaporate over time, leaving an inky crust of marks that result in a painting. 

 The installation exposes all the different stages of transformation in the painting process that viewers don’t normally see in a gallery. As opposed to my painting practice, the melting of the spheres is a natural act of painting without an artist’s hand. The normality of the roadside has been restructured to direct attention and heighten awareness to what is so commonly overlooked.


cordyceps

Alison Neville
, Utah

Fungi, maps, and political events permeate most of my work. I find them to be bizarre and otherworldly. This being said I cannot understand enough about them. I wonder how they can be combined, what can be learned from them? Are there ways to bring out those things that intrigue me?

I examine world events and try to dissect them into understandable pieces. I try to play the scientist. The small and common button mushroom, available at every super-market, becomes the map for a nebula only seen through the eye of the Hubble Space telescope. I use maps to help me interpret political fragments into the cross-stitches that I can carry with me. Adding little indications of this research to make roads and public buildings. Cordyceps spring up in new varieties that choose kitsch statuettes as their hosts.

 

Ellie

Ellie Duffy, Savannah, GA

In the world my sculptures live in, the roles and power of humans are perversed and their energies are used in different ways. A world where we function within the systems and the cycles of the earth, instead of against them. I imagine small humans, making the world around them, creating my sculptures. They source materials where they can, usually from the trash, reusing what others don’t want. They use power tools when they have access, but much of the work is collective, with lots of hand tools. The work is harder this way, but they know more effort now is part of the solution. Their efforts are not misplaced.

My use of bugs, in particular cockroaches, is part of this other reality. It’s nodding at the concepts of the anthropocene and the sixth great extinction. The cockroaches are humans; we are the same, the great generalists, too good at what we do. But this shouldn’t be upsetting. This is why the cockroaches are dancing, a knowing and joyous dance with the humans. We are stepping around as lightly as possible, aware of our power, but placing our energies into the cycles, giving back what we use.

Another part of my practice has been growing mycelial materials (strong materials, out of fungal mycelial,) which is in direct relation to the cycling ideology. The mycelial materials are grown on agricultural waste, creating art out of trash, cycle, cycle. Fungus is so incredible for many reasons, but one of the most amazing, is its ability to transform. Transform wood dust into a brick, petrochemicals into carbon and usable molecules, and lignin into medicinal compounds. Ecologically fungi hold the place in between death and life, cycling, cycling, working so hard. If we can work with them, we can integrate their knowledge and power into our systems. Then perhaps they won’t be so separate, and we can all dance a little more.

arave

 

Jennifer Arave, Minneapolis, MN

I am discovering that the primary emphasis of my dance/movement career over the past 10-15 years has been grounded in the ability/disability to interface and build connections with others.  I have zeroed in on systems and sometimes entities that connect/disconnect and even mislead to create disconnections through confusion -- be it political, or philosophical or interpersonal in nature. Many man-made systems that are meant to connect have ultimately confused, obfuscated and blown-up rather than the well-intended connection as purported. This translate ironically, into a perception of isolation, from others and within the individual. Among the systems, technology has often been the object of disdain and the brunt of the critical humor in my work.

I work in dance because of its ability to be a substantial connector including dancers, somatic practitioners, and other living beings; wordless movement that bridges gaps, brings clarity and a sense of completion as verbal language is removed. A somatic practice can detangle snags and confusions and a dependency on a verbal language system. This is also true for the movement education modalities I have chosen to invest my time in. Open Source Forms and Body-Mind Centering have opened deep channels into inter-body communication; wordless pathways that become a bridge not only in human to human interaction, but also perhaps connections in shared consciousnesses, human or other-wise.

isobel

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

As a budding mycophile and printmaker, I’ve long had an ambition to incorporate mushrooms into my work. Several spore print experiments have gone rather badly! I would love to learn more about the science of mushrooms, and as someone who studied biology in college, I feel that this program perfectly melds several of my interests and could be very fruitful for my future projects.

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.” I would love to incorporate mushrooms, or even the philosophy of mushrooms, into one or both of these art forms.

yura

 

Selinavov Yura, Moscow

Studying the aspects of the interaction of man and nature in the current and previous eras paves the way to talk about ecology, decolonization and politics in general. Now my interests turn to working with non-human agents, in particular to the living and especially to mushrooms, as an influential realm, with
a number of peculiarities-metaphors associated with rhizome, mystery, death and recognition of the end of anthropocentrism in thinking, introducing previously unnoticed, but an incredibly huge contribution to the world.
Vitalistic materialism philosophy is important for me. It affirms the material basis of the whole world, the agency of all matter, assuming the incomplete knowability of the world, and the mysterious nature of
vitality, as the interweaving of turbulent flows and forces.

Jody

 

Jody Guralnick, Aspen, Colorado

I’ve named this body of work The Fifth Kingdom which is, in taxonomy, the kingdom of Fungi, the kingdom of the great hidden labyrinths of growth and decay that support all life.

This work functions at the intersection of the world we know, and what we can see if we look closer and closer still, the world of everyday reality, and the larger truths that govern life on this planet. I mingle such forms as rods, spheres, buds, blossoms and leaves that make up our earth, as well as roots and networks that link it all together. This is work that seeks to call attention to the detail; through an accretion of small marks I am replicating large systems and life forms.
I’ve observed lichen growing on rocks, slowly, slowly digesting the minerals from the rock and nutrients from the air and I’ve sought to replicate the universal order and form that that growth takes. I’m interested in the symbiosis of the forest, the connecting and dismantling that goes on in equal parts. I’m painting the patterning and root systems of these life forms.

 We can look at human vascular systems, or brain slices, or the view from an airplane window and see over and over again systems of networks working in partnership. We are attracted to these patterns because they are a part of us. I am painting a vision of pattern and connection.

Biophilia

MIchael Pissano

Michael Pissano, Pittsburgh, PA
Expedition leader

Michael Pisano is an animator, illustrator, and filmmaker. His first career aspiration was to be a dinosaur. Later acquisition of bifocals in suburban New Jersey led to an amateur interest in small things: ants, pondscum particles, fine print, and the Earth as featured in illustrations of the solar system.

Michael uses storytelling, from documentary to illustration series to transmedia hybrids, to educate about nature and the importance of stewardship in the Anthropocene. His nonfiction work highlights the intricacy and intertwined beauty of all living things, and the researchers and activists working to understand and protect them. His fiction work uses the treatment of nature in myth and fantasy as a point of entry into environmental justice conversations.

Since reading E.O. Wilson’s ​Naturalist​ at age 11, ants remain his favorite animal. He admires the qualities they represent: collaboration, selflessness, curiosity. Ants also remind Michael of relative scale, that humans are cells on a gently revolving giant. The giant clambers a circle around an infinite cosmos. That cosmos repeats infinitely. Simultaneously, we are each a subatomic cosmos, infinite electrons arrayed into monkey shapes wearing infinite plant fiber atoms using a variety of small boxes inside of bigger boxes, all experienced inside a fractalized matroyshka series of perceived cultural boxes. Thanks, ants.

Dawn George

 

Dawn George, Hammonds Plains,
Nova Scotia

I work with film and video because movement and sound fascinate me. I’m interested in recording natural objects that have very minimal movements like a seed, a plant, an insect, or mold and then reveal how they communicate through subtle often time-lapsed movements. I develop ways to enhance the visuals through subtle animation, colour changes, and sound design. The films I create are rooted in environmentalism with subtle elements of science fiction.

When working with film I prefer to use eco-processing developers made from the plants I am filming to bring a multifaceted quality to the image. When I work digitally, I use editing techniques, masking, compositing, time-lapse photography, and computer animation to create subtle changes in the moving images. Audio design plays a large role in my practice. I prefer to source sounds found in nature or create my own sounds (usually from my kitchen) and then use audio editing programs to adjust a sound’s features to compliment the video.

Nature provides me with a sense of inspiration and peace, and I am always seeking ways to work with it and in it. I believe that nature holds universal truths and through careful observation, it speaks to us. Through these observations, I look for the connections that help me understand life on this planet and incorporate this into my work.

Enticement

 

Amanda McKenzie, Edmonton, AB

Enticement , explores creating fabrications of fish, insects, birds, lures, and bait imagery. I photograph and scan in imagery of fish, invertebrates, feathers, and real tackle to create new amalgamations of what could be perceived and are initially considered as an ordinary fishing lure or aquatic creature. I meticulously collage these images and objects together and screenprint numerous altered colour layers that result in shimmering and iridescent creations of uncanny decoys. With this series I am inventing colourful fusions of creatures and the bait that attracts and captures them, thus creating a juxtaposition between the natural and artificial.

The work focuses on falsities in perception. I enjoy creating work that appears to be one way, but on closer inspection the viewer can investigate and discover the true nature of the image. I am interested in how the viewer engages with my work, by what attracts them and also to what is successfully deceptive.

I am exploring the artform, history, and obsession of fishing and fly tying, as well as concepts of object fixation/fetishization, and the habits of incessant collecting. I examine my own femininity in a male dominated area, and am constantly questioning and determining my stance within the culture of sport fishing and the aquarist’s role in fish keeping. I am creating this work through the lens of nostalgia which assists to reconnect me to my late father and to my initial connection to fishing. With my body of work I am enthusiastically researching deeper into the areas of ichthyology, entomology, and ornithology as I choose, collect, transform, and reimagine my creations.

Bohie Palecek
Bohie Palecek
, Braidwood, NSW Australia

Bohie Palecek is inspired by nature at a micro-level and uses the natural world as a metaphor for her personal experiences. Her narrative-driven artworks are inherently innocent, as if seen through the eyes of an empathetic child with a curious nature. They toy with a dichotomy between the safety of home and the wildness beyond; the known and the unknown. As her femininity breaks free of domestication her courage takes her into the motherly arms of the natural world, welcoming her back to the strength and support of her female ancestors. Opposing this connection is an inherently threatening force with malicious intent, the product of a child brought up with off-the-grid parents who retreated from the intrinsically man made threats of Y2K, identity theft, world wars and food shortages. This lack of security creates the yang to the curious child’s yin, often resulting in shadowy themes being presented in misleadingly bright and cheerful colours.

Somewhere in the artificial constructs of what it means to be a woman in today’s climate, Bohie sifts through contemporary mythology for a sense of her own identity.

Mary Abma

Mary Abma, Bright’s Grove, ON

My work is rooted in the land. For years, my practice has led me to combine my artistic expression with knowledge gained through scientific exploration. Botany has been at the forefront of my artistic practice for a decade, now. I work on comprehensive projects that explore the interconnections between our natural environment and our lives. Through my works, I have learned the basics of botany, developed a passion for plants—especially trees, and have become dedicated to creating series of artworks that explore the impact of our actions and inattention which contributes to the destruction of our forest ecosystems.

I recently completed a four-year project through which I mourned the loss of our native ash trees due to the emerald ash borer. I am currently looking for inspiration for my next major project. My works always involve research and collaboration with scientists and other professionals whose insights give deeper meaning to my work. The “Germinate” residency is exactly what I need right now. Exploring the natural environment in Gatineau, and opportunities to speak with other professionals about the botany of the area will certainly influence the direction that my work will take over the next several years.

Rachel Kavathe

 

Rachel Kavathe, Columbus, IN

My work focuses on our connections to the natural environment and sense of place. In addition to my work as an artist, I also am a landscape architect and urban designer. In all three professions, there is a central question that drives my work. I am seeking to understand how our communities can better connect to the natural world and better integrate biodiversity into our built environments.

Through my academic work, I explore our cultural understanding of the meaning of nature and how this definition must evolve along with our changing environment. As an urban designer and city planner, I work to better integrate natural systems into built environments and connect people to their natural environment.

As an artist, I seek to find ways to express the importance of this subject matter through form, color and material. My sculptural work is predominantly stone carving, with a mix of media to represent the tensions between natural and human made materials. My sculptures incorporate limestone, marble, alabaster, copper, brass, 3D printed materials, acrylic, resin, and natural found objects. In my paintings, I explore the forms and colors of my surrounding landscapes as a means to better understand the true essence of these environments.

Doris LamontagneDoris Lamontagne, Ottawa, Canada

My art reflects on the interactions between beings in adjacent environments. It highlights the contrasts and similarities between beings and exposes the dynamism that emerges from these relationships. Whether ecological, geographical or cultural, my art makes an attempt to illustrate the dynamic nature of these worlds: attraction versus opposition.

In this series of five prints, I explore “panpsychism” which entails that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality. All things share these mental qualities: feeling, inner life, subjectivity, and perception. All things experience pleasure, pain, visual or auditory sensations, etc.

In my research, I investigate the possibility that one destiny of a being affects the destiny of all beings. Call it ecology, Gaia or holistic, everything is connected: the equilibrium between the forces of attraction and opposition keeps us breathing.

Sophy

Sophy Tuttle, Lowell, MA

My artwork is focused on the natural world, our place in it, and the conflicts and collaborations we find ourselves in everyday with nature. My bright, carefully researched murals and paintings often aim to disrupt deeply embedded beliefs about the hierarchy of nature. I lovingly render birds, animals,
My artwork is focused on the natural world, our place in it, and the conflicts and collaborations we find ourselves in everyday with nature. My bright, carefully researched murals and paintings often aim to disrupt deeply embedded beliefs about the hierarchy of nature. I lovingly render birds, animals, and plants to evoke a sense of awe and reverence for these beings. Although extinction and loss loom in the man-made Anthropocene era, I hope that my paintings call attention to the magnificent beauty that still exists in nature today. I believe the best artwork catalyzes new ways of thinking about the world we live in. I count myself among the growing cohort of artists who are exploring the themes of the Anthropocene in a curious and humane way.

Thakery

 

Amanda Thackray, Newark, NJ

Amanda Thackray Artist Statement Through my studio practice I investigate fibers, tissues, and other particles with prefixes of micro. I create quasi-fictional biological landscapes of the microscopic in shifting scales. From small cast-glass monuments to installations that envelope entire walls, my work seeks to create kinship with the minute by raising questions about the materiality of our being.
This work is primarily concerned with the microscopic unknown of the human body, but has recently expanded to include a parallel body of work focusing on microplastics. In 2017, I started a project concerned with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch during a residency in Eastport Maine, a small town on the Northeastern border of the US. This work in progress, titled 1,000 Square Feet (0.00701459%) Project. I have continued this project by visiting global sites, and to date have created 400 prints, each twelve inches square, with an end goal of 1,000 prints. Each print is created on handmade paper using site-specific water - literally embedding traces of the environment, both natural and man-made, into the artwork. These prints attempt to simulate a fictional segment of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - one that is created from plastic waste that is rescued from the shoreline of each site that I visit.

clair

 

Claire Fleming Staples, Oakland CA

Plants are an intrinsic element of my painting practice, and my life. As I have become more knowledgeable about wild plants, how to harvest and make medicines from them, the plants in my paintings have become more specific and realized. My house plants have become more diverse and abundant. As my life has been troubled by the rancor of late capitalist urbanity, the tragic death of loved ones, my art practice has become about healing; painting an ameliorating garden of lush colors, leaves, flowers, vines and  growing an Arcadian vision for the viewer to step into.  In my somatic Reiki therapy practice, l receive visions of plant allies that I incorporate into my work, along with other symbols and metaphysical tools. Working in this way I am grateful for the newly discovered artistic ancestry of Hilma Af Klint, the Pennsylvania Dutch and Shaker artists I grew up with, as well as Medieval Christian paintings whose plant lore point to a pagan magical herbalism lying just beneath the surface. I am at home in the natural world, and I am always seeking to sow it back into the city.
 
I am eager for the opportunity to be able to delve deeper in my relationship with growing/harvesting/preparing  and observing/rendering plants by adding the lenses of botany and biology to my practice. I think it is the key in tying together the Balsam Root in my painting Sunspell, that first captured my fascination in Lassen, and that now hangs drying in my pantry, harvested from my friend’s farm in Mendocino.

 

 

 

Germinate

Alyssa ellis


Alyssa Ellis, Calgary, Alberta
Expedition Leader

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

Stephanie Andrews

Stephanie Andrews, Berkeley California

Stephanie Andrews is a multimedia artist, experience designer, and instructor at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.  She often creates art games, tactile spaces, and playful participatory installations that respond to emergent, speculative, and contemporary issues with levity and sentimentality.  Stephanie brings to her art practice an interdisciplinary background spanning software engineering, interaction design, public policy, social work, and community organizing.

Hidenouri

Hidenori Ishii, Astoria, NY

My work investigates the paradoxical dichotomy of civilization and nature through the interdependence which lies in between. It reveals a tenuous axis on which the two worlds serendipitously coexist, merging past and future onto a single plane.

Abstractions in painting and installation invert binaries of nature and camouflage, disaster and neglect, artificiality and object. They are characterized by such negations; images materialize from obstruction and walls eradicate structure. Just as the visible and concealed fluctuate, the work wavers from completion - as though it is still growing, eroding, or waiting for the reflection to break on the water’s surface.

Combining mechanical and gestural modes of image-making, I reproduce control and circumstance in a mimicry of cause/effect in nature. Built with layers of alternating transparency, the paintings take on a quality much like reflective glass, at once materializing interior and exterior. In that likeness, I present the unconscious as physical reality. Flowers define space and atmosphere, inducing the haze of a dream or psychosis. Vacant mirrors replace landscapes as contradictions of the sublime and superficial.

The narrative of my work exists within a margin of disbelief, reminding viewer that fiction diverges from fact. My earlier project, IcePlants, was a direct response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown, and considered how beauty might persist as landscape turns mutant. The possibilities presented in my work suggest how we might connect political ecology and social consciousness to face our current climactic crisis.

Ana Garcia

 

Ana Barrera Garcia, Madrid, Spain

My life as an artist began when I was a child and my parents applied for me in a weekend art school in a small village Northern Spain. My inspiration was drawn to a close when I moved to Madrid to get my Agricultural Engineer degree.
I got a permanent job position and I decided to come back to my art. I chose painting with watercolor for the first time and I fell in love with this medium. Since then we are having a faithful relationship.

Discovering how much my life changes with art, I founded an art atelier at a Single Mothers Residency in Madrid where as a volunteer I shared my art with children having particular needs. In that moment I realized that art therapy exists and works. Then, I follow the process of being a Gestalt art therapist with the goal of consciousness expansion through the use of creative and artistic resources.

My life is flowing with creating works of watercolors, not only in painting, but designing coin purses and pencil cases as well. Creating emotions interpretations of art from themes of my life experiences, everyday items, travels, and nature, I am in constant need of exploration with color, shapes, and atmospheres. I enjoy sharing my knowledge and my personal excitement of the arts through teaching and conducting art therapy sessions

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Meggan Joy Trobaugh, Seattle

Meggan Joy (Trobaugh) is an emerging exhibiting fine art photographer and digital collage artist, who is currently located in Seattle, Washington. For the last few years, her work has focused on digitally combined flora and fauna, as well as various found objects, in a modern interpretation of a 16th-century painting technique by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The finished work being a woven web of details, isolated on a black background - forcing the viewer to soak up the shape vs. the familiar elements that created it, or vice versa, depending on how close they look. The work reveals a subject that could never exist in the real world, made of thousands of her own photographs. Sometimes taking up to two years to complete, the finished works have been well received internationally, and Meggan was awarded an Honorable Mention by the International Photography Awards for her winning entry, "Warmth" which was completed in 2016.

Mary Abma

Mary Abma, Bright’s Grove, ON

My work is rooted in the land. For years, my practice has led me to combine my artistic expression with knowledge gained through scientific exploration. Botany has been at the forefront of my artistic practice for a decade, now. I work on comprehensive projects that explore the interconnections between our natural environment and our lives. Through my works, I have learned the basics of botany, developed a passion for plants—especially trees, and have become dedicated to creating series of artworks that explore the impact of our actions and inattention which contributes to the destruction of our forest ecosystems.

I recently completed a four-year project through which I mourned the loss of our native ash trees due to the emerald ash borer. I am currently looking for inspiration for my next major project. My works always involve research and collaboration with scientists and other professionals whose insights give deeper meaning to my work. The “Germinate” residency is exactly what I need right now. Exploring the natural environment in Gatineau, and opportunities to speak with other professionals about the botany of the area will certainly influence the direction that my work will take over the next several years.

Holmes

Rachel Holmes, London, UK

I am a british mixed media artist working with digital and phyiscal media, and performance. I am interested in the “world of the dead” as the site of possibility mediated through dream, and odysseys of migration between the world of living and the dead. The “dead” or the possibility they represent, appear in my artworks in the motif of dolls, and more recently plants. Part of my practice involves excavating a  dream language by developing a theory of picture, illusion and ritualistic performance in the context of feedback from the natural environment.
I have been awarded a scholarship for my PhD project at Kingston School of Art, engaging in this field of research in my project “The Body Without Identity”.
In taking part in this research program I would like to develop my knowledge of botany and plants, particularly in how it can relate to my practice.

MIka Aono

 

Mika Aono, Eugene, OR d.com/home.html

I have been an obsessive collector since I was a child; shiny acorns, smooth pebbles and dragon fly wings... Still today, every time I see a rusty nail on the ground, I put it in my pocket. I dream of what it was before and what it might become and re-membered them. To "remember" is to put back together, to make whole. I'm interested in giving broken, cast-aside things new life. I want to find meaning in the meaningless. This compulsion seems a pointless gesture, yet it is precisely this "odd" behavior that reveals who we are. I explore the humanness of absurdity and futility through laborious processes, finding value in failure.
Seems like slowly but surely, humans and nature are becoming things that exist at opposite ends. When? How? My idiosyncratic actions are a way for me to genuinely pay attention to my surroundings and cope with the sadness I experience.

I have made work that was inspired by fractal structures. I imagined the patterns being one of the keys to solving the mystery of inter-connectedness among all living things.  I cherish serendipity. In ever changing, shifting landscapes, I'm seeking a way to exist with nature in equilibrium.

 
birds

Ashlee mays

 

 

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN
Expedition Leader

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Melanie

Melanie Long, Calgary, AB

My artwork answers the questions that I want to ask the world. My practice is an ongoing
conversation and though my work I continue to research and gather information. I observe and survey human nature for the answers, where I focus on behaviour both intrinsically and externally motivated and individual intuition.

The intuition of an individual is an ongoing thread in my practice. I seek to find connections in individuals through their interpretations of symbols and thought processes. I have found there are abundant connections where there ought not be, and similarities that run deep which on the surface would appear implausible. I studied intuition for my “Herd” project, where I crafted a number of deer heads out of blown glass. Each glass head began as a case study on a specific individual, all of whom were picked at random and administered a series of free association questionnaires. This project is still underway as I continue to investigate the commonalities and differences in how people are connected through their thoughts and intuition.

Symbols are as common in cognitive thought as breathing. They can be universal, such as a cross, or accidental/personal such as a child identifies all giraffes with their mother, who was obsessed with them when they were young. A current project I am working on seeks to gain understanding of thought processes behind specific associations with sports numbers. When athletes are on the rink, court or field they are collectively represented by their team/club, and then individually by a number. I have begun by composing portraits of hockey players with the number 16, and asking the specific question “why did you choose #16?”. The answers I hope to find are whether there is a
commonality behind their associations or nothing at all.

 As I navigate the world through my art I will only continue to dig deeper in the questions I ask, and ask of the world around me. I strive to continue to see the world through fresh eyes and interpret my findings through glass, paint or pen.

Ellen Little

 

Ellen Little, San Francisco

My work is inspired and guided by the natural things I find in my backyard and on my morning walks through urban wild spaces. I am fascinated by how the natural world adapts to the human world. By magnifying that which is small and temporary in nature - flowers, moths, dead birds and other ephemera become poignant reminders of the transience of life.

Throughout history flowers have represented fertility and birth while moths have been associated with death and decay. So I combine flowers and moths in my Backyard Series to suggest the interconnectedness and fragility of life where birth, aging and death are intertwined and nothing remains constant.

My Urban Bird paintings are inspired by an article in the New York Times about FLAP and the birds that crash into windows. I paint from real bird carcasses that I find or that friends bring me.

Sharon Peoples

 

Sharon Peoples, Australia

Sharon Peoples has worked as an artist in Canberra, Australia, for over 20 years, exhibiting nationally and internationally as well as taking on commissioned work. Her art practice focuses on textiles, both hand and machine embroidery. Peoples’ work has been collected by national and state institutions. In recent years Sharon has been exploring birds and their relationship to suburban gardens. She has done this through portraits: the inner secret garden, artists’ gardens and gardens of the imagination. Her upcoming exhibition Messenger in the Garden at Timeless Textiles (Australia’s only commercial textile gallery) examines this relationship. Fragility of both the environment and the human condition is reflected in the medium: oscillating between hand and machine embroidery to examine this state.

redbird

 

 

Meg Nicks, Canmore, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me. Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope.

Shae

Shae Warnick, Columbus, IN

Shae is an artist with her roots in nature. If she’s not painting, she’s outside learning the names of things, reading books about birds, or opening drawers in the research collections of natural history museums. Most of Shae’s images are inspired by the ornithological specimens observed in research collections
around the world, and all are inspired by her own personal observations in the field.

An accomplished painter and installation artist, Shae’s rows of painted bird specimens examine repetitiveness and the intimate knowledge to be gained from looking in the same place again and again, questioning whether a reservoir of past observations increases or rather diminishes the value of what we see. Similarly, all of her work deals with perceptions that might be distancing people from nature, and the ever increasing decorative, curated, and customized role that nature plays in our lives. Shae approaches these dialogues as a layperson with unquenchable curiosity, trying to find a balance between science and sentiment, believing that a thoughtful consideration of both sides will engender a more tempered, truthful, and inviting outlook on the natural world.

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Adelle Pound, Northern Ireland

I am a wildlife artist and keen birdwatcher. I work in a number of mediums such as acrylic, watercolour, drawing, collage and cut paper. Fieldwork and drawing from life is central to my practice. This is both a creative endeavour in itself and a way of generating resource material. Studying birds in their natural habitat is a crucial process which drives the ideas that inform the development of new work.

In Northern Ireland where we are visited by migratory birds from across the globe. This seasonal coming and going has be part of life and culture here for as long as there have been people to witness it. I am just the latest in a long line of “watchers”. The birds likewise are the latest in generations that go back into the far distant past.

In May 2016 I  took part, with 11 other artists, in the Copeland Art Project. This took the form of a weekend residency at the Copeland Bird Observatory, followed by a series of developing and evolving exhibitions throughout the summer. This resulted in a short graphic story called “to be Continued”. I am currently researching material for more extended narrative pieces.

 
infinitesimal

evelyn

Eveline Kolijn, Calgary, Alberta

The sea permeated my upbringing in the Caribbean. Now I am living in Alberta, where the sea is a memory, an ancient fossil bed high in the mountains. It holds a history of evolution: life emerging, harnessing sunlight and creating the breathing oceans that give us oxygen. Revisiting the places of my childhood, I have witnessed the shocking degradation of coral reefs as a result of the ocean’s changing chemistry. This set me on the course of reading on evolutionary theory and micro-biology, systems thinking and climate change with creating visual art inspired by this thinking, mostly in the realm of printmaking, small installations and recently, video.

Everything is connected through a web called the Biosphere. I am fascinated with the concept of the Noösphere, defined by Vladimir Vernadsky hundred years ago as the mental sphere of life; the capacity of human thought to change the Biosphere. Now, we call this outcome the Anthropocene: the epoch of human impact on ecosystems, including climate change.

As an artist, I practise making-thinking. What does it mean to be an artist in the age of the Anthropocene? How do we become ecologically intelligent? The Anthropocene challenges human exceptionalism. We must come to a fundamental understanding we are a porous organism, a Human Holobiont, with microbial kin and symbiotic relationships in a living world. To me, the web of life is most poignant and beautiful at the micro-level, which is why I am attracted to make visible the invisible; to inspire and create awareness of this connection.

erin

Erin L Kuhn, Tempe, Arizona

Moving to Arizona has made me rethink the meaning of home. It’s the people here, that really changed my perception on appreciating the land we walk on and a respecting people with their different cultures. For a long time, I had been misinterpreting my own homelessness. In a sense of emotional displacement, I have always been homeless. Now, a place of residency is not a home. It is a clinical reference of a person’s applied location, but a Home is an external imprint onto the internal.

In my work, I collect memory from where I have walked, by attaching Printmaking plate to my feet and walking on them. The abused surfaces of the printing plates are a narration of the external and internal homeless journey. This organic/abstract poetry is then formulated into a prosses of discover and translated into a confliction of scientific language. The formulated process has the most relatable translation of Aboriginal Dream Lines and Mapmaking.

My work is something that is not easily to come to terms with for everyone. It is the nature of its play on perception, and the act upon human emotional experience that questions a person’s life journey up to that given point in time. What is given in my work, is the conviction of being lost or found.

jen

Jen Urso, Phoenix, Arizona

My practice has always revolved around subtleties of environments and behavior as well as attempting to undo the constructs expected to be necessary to take part in an artwork. I like looking at the details. I like the idea that there is always something more complex, if we just take the time and attention to notice it. The process of awareness and investigation steers us away from the allure of a spectacle to discover something possibly more intimate and vulnerable. In a public setting where we’re drawn to be distracted, I create stumbled-on moments of focus with ephemeral materials or performance. In a gallery setting that already encourages hyper-awareness, I create an up-closeness or near invisibility so the work can be ignored or experienced intimately. I want to show that there is always more to the dazzling surface and that the “more” part is what makes us interesting, inquisitive creatures.

dawn

 

Dawn George, Hammonds Plains,
Nova Scotia

www.dawngeorge.com/

I work with film and video because movement and sound fascinate me. I’m interested in recording natural objects that have very minimal movements like a seed, a plant, an insect, or mold and then reveal how they communicate through subtle often time-lapsed movements. I develop ways to enhance the visuals through subtle animation, colour changes, and sound design. The films I create are rooted in environmentalism with subtle elements of science fiction.

When working with film I prefer to use eco-processing developers made from the plants I am filming to bring a multifaceted quality to the image. When I work digitally, I use editing techniques, masking, compositing, time-lapse photography, and computer animation to create subtle changes in the moving images. Audio design plays a large role in my practice. I prefer to source sounds found in nature or create my own sounds (usually from my kitchen) and then use audio editing programs to adjust a sound’s features to compliment the video.

Nature provides me with a sense of inspiration and peace, and I am always seeking ways to work with it and in it. I believe that nature holds universal truths and through careful observation, it speaks to us. Through these observations, I look for the connections that help me understand life on this planet and incorporate this into my work.

twyla

 

Twyla Nova, Duncanville, Texas

My artwork incorporates various photographic processes. Although each series explores a
different concept, the underlying theme throughout is our complex relationship to the natural
world. Through investigating representations of nature whether this be domestic spaces, artistic
practices, scientific imagery, educational institutions, or as commodity. Included in this
application are pieces are from the series Trace Farewell, The Photo Lark, and Specimen. The first
two series focus on representations of endangered species. Trace Farewell appropriates
illustrations of endangered species published in the early 70s while The Photo Lark appropriates
current photographs taken of endangered species as a means of archiving species before their
extinction much like the mission of many contemporary zoos to house species extinct in the wild
referred to as “the ark.” Although many photographs of endangered species are created with the
intention of promoting preservation, they also exemplify Roland Barthes notions in Camera
Lucida of the “trauma of separation, loss, and death” as experienced through
photography. These iconic images may one day be nothing more than indexical traces of their
extinct referents. The last series Specimen emulates the aesthetic qualities of scientific imagery
using domestic subjects, circular crops, and inverted colors referencing specimens as seen
through a microscope.

     
Ritual
  Mortem
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Ashley Czajkowski,
Arizona
Expedition Leader

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.

 

tykf  

Sharon Stevens, Calgary, Alberta

I am a media artist, curator, and community celebrationist. My art practice is externalized as community-based and collaborative projects evidenced by Id Collective, Council of Community Conveyors, Finding the P Spot, and OX A Crash Course on Loving Calgary. These projects along with all the artists mobilized to participate in the Equinox Vigil point to my belief that by working together we can create experiential beauty.

In 2012 I initiated and now annually produce Equinox Vigil in Union Cemetery. I bring together artists and Calgarians of every stripe and persuasion in a free, non-denominational event to honour the dead and reflect on the universal experience of death. The result is beautiful, multi-disciplinary, participatory, enchanted and unforgettable.

I personally contribute a media art installation called Digital Shrine "Our notes, having been turned simply into light, roll up the screen like credits, a kind of contemporary paper-burning ceremony.  Lindsay Sorell writer Equinox Vigil Commemorative book 2017

As a socially-engaged artist I am as likely to be giving a talk at an artist-run centre as leading the charge in a performance/protest piece dressed up as oil-drenched duck. This kind of work is invigorating and exhausting. I find a sense of humour along with embodying creativity is essential for well beings. Finding a balance for restorative solitude is also a life goal.

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Regan Henley
, Syracuse, NY

Death is the only sure, universal thing in this world. Still, it is something most of us only approach with meekness when it is at our own doorstep. We have grieved and cared for our dead for all of history, yet when the time comes for us, we find ourselves paralyzed.

We are unsure how to feel, what we’re allowed to feel, and how it looks to others. Despite the myriad of healthy ways and methods grief manifests culturally, spiritually and individually, it is all too easy to rob ourselves of the experience of grief in some form or another for fear to embracing our grief in its entirety. In doing this, we lose out on the valuable realizations of of our own mortality as well.

As an artist, I am interested in using digital technology and art therapeutic elements to explore and promote healthy grieving, provide an alternative to end of life anxiety, and find new ways of expressing ritual, and continuing bonds with our deceased.

My work investigates intersections of emotional intimacy in conjunction with new digital technologies and internet culture. I am interested in cultural perceptions of death and dying in the digital era, as well as using art to interrogate evolving forms of grieving and mourning rituals perpetuated online and through new forms of media.

Though disparate in medium and method, my works aim to use language and symbolism as a vehicle to move through trauma, and grief. In these personal, cathartic and at times, darkly humorous works I explore concepts of loss, ritual, and the healing power of tenderness and honesty.

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Sandrine Schaefer, Waltham, MA

Using a site-sensitive approach, my work asks how bodies measure time while enduring
institutional mediation, shared space and other external forces. My work often presents as performance art installations that propose ways to share time not accessible elsewhere in life. Through the use of surreal imagery and subtle auditory and olfactory components, I create situations for audiences to gather around that break traditional viewing behaviors. I do this by deprivileging sight as the primary sense to engage the work; rewarding curious viewers; and using extended duration and repetition to cultivate spaces for return. My work tends towards material sparseness to draw attention to what is readily available in a site and has a low-impact on the physical environment. I have made work in hundreds of art and non-art designated spaces across the globe since 2004.

76f  


Ashley Wasilewski
, Newton, MA

In my work I investigate ways to create physical representations of human mentality and
internal struggle. Through a rigorous research practice that translates into performance I bring to life manifestations of mental illness, intimacy, death and the relationship between the limits of the body and the power of the mind. The conceptual aspects of my work is driven by the human experience: the universal and the persona; By creating a visual manifestation of the human experience through performance, I am able to create physical translations of my experiences and simulate control of what I often do not have conscious control over, which in turn teaches me to cope and heal. We all die, but not all humans experience mental illness, or being queer. Everyone has a different experience in life. My performances represent both my personal experiences as well as human nature as a whole. My aim is to research, discover and communicate what it means to be a human being through performance.

yt
 

Brad Modlin, Nebraska

I live on the lookout for what makes humans human. People experience self-consciousness. Giraffes don’t get embarrassed. Therefore, the feeling of being the isolated, odd-one-out actually connects us to our species. My last book of poems, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names, considers self-consciousness in humorous and serious ways. It explores feeling like the oddball, the only unhip party guest who has just one first name and cannot keep track of everyone else’s two—names they keep switching between as the night progresses.

Unlike animals, humans know we will pass away and mark our days by avoiding signs of its approach (aging). But Federico García Lorca said that the poet seized by duende—the impulsive, creative force—always remembers that death approaches. My current projects include fiction about fasting—ascetics bringing the body to its livable limit. My poems are laced with death and resurrection.

Object
 

Mortem

y   Chantal Lafond, Calgary, AB

I am an emerging artist based in Calgary, Alberta, primarily working with traditional fibre techniques such as weaving, knitting and embroidery. My work often includes objects and materials that are conducive to preservation, or protective, nurturing acts.
In addition to working within the realm of fibre, I also work with installation and sculptural assemblage. Through these aspects of my practice I have sought to reactivate the materials used by the artist Joseph Beuys. I am particularly interested in his recurring use of felt and fat in both his sculptural and performative works due to their potential for insulation, as well as the conductive properties they share. When creating installations I like to cultivate the suggestion of a performative act about to take place, or the subsequent residue of something that has already occurred.

Currently, my practice is focused on creating hand-woven objects to be used to prepare a body for burial or cremation. I seek to share an understanding of the importance of these objects as they have appeared in many cultures throughout history, as well as examine their use in our present time and place, and their potentials for increased recognition as accessible and meaningful handmade funerary vessels.

Through my work I strive to reconnect to the physical and emotional labour of death and mourning typically carried out collectively by the women of a community. Upon witnessing my work, I hope to allow viewers to consider that there can be care, beauty, and intimacy in death.

uyf  

 

Judy Duggan-McCormack, Hamilton ON

As a textile artist, the work I generate I would articulate as both subjective and observant. I create with a desire to explore and satisfy my artistic needs while incorporating historical and genealogical facts or nuances. I feel a longing to explore, collect, source and sample from events that have taken place through generations of my own family as well as obscurely chronicled narratives of the past. My design plan can either be a 'spark' of inspiration or an observation from another influence, Therefore I remain open until I have researched my thoughts, findings and ideas and my initial project plan may morph between the idea stage and the execution of the art piece.

My current work, is an amalgamation of contemporary and historical design, executed in a variety of textile forms ranging from knitting, crochet, dyeing, beadwork and embroidery or a blend of all of the above. I am often drawn to cemeteries for inspiration for my work as the rich history offers a plethora of ideas and stories.  Much can be read from a grave marker no matter how simple the inscription.  The idea that a person whom I did not know has been buried with so many more stories to tell instills the need for me to give the life a narrative through my art.

kj  


Toni Ardizzone
, Tallahassee, FL

Combining a vibrant color palette, dense composition, and bold approach with an unapologetic study of mortality, my work exposes the ferocity of nature and the trauma associated with survival. Having been exploring death in my work for several years, I experienced the misfortune of facing my own memento mori in 2018. Recovering from bodily trauma, I returned to my studio with wilting “get well” flower arrangements I received while hospitalized. Not typically interested in painting flowers, I chose the subject in a utilitarian fashion to recharge my practice. Painting these arrangements in decay generated connections between survival, loss, death, memory, and transformation.

Incorporating cardboard, window curtains, pillow cases, bed sheets, and vintage printed paper into my paintings, much of my work is best described as 2D assemblages. These discarded materials allow me to build, deconstruct, rip, tear, cut, mold and manipulate forms reflecting the deaths we meet within life. The nuanced surfaces help to define the ravage nature of survival and the forced patterns created from emotional and psychological loss.

Living near the Gulf coast of Florida, I have witnessed the devastation of Hurricane Michael. By documenting the ruins of its path I am holding a mirror to life’s fragility and disaster, but also uncovering the portrait of survival. My most recent work Remains layers the imagery of the wilting flowers and the hurricane debris while drawing parallels between crumbling skeletons of houses and an encounter with ravaging illness. Defined by vivaciousness, my work embraces the natural processes of life with honesty and fervor.

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Katie Barron, Canmore, Alberta

Life is short and made for enjoying. So many of the things that we interact with on a regular basis spark some small form of joy; whether it be a happy memory, a love of a particular colour, or a delicious flavour. By taking the time to fully render these simple objects I get the pleasure of exploring all of the small things that add up to something so simply joyful. Painting realism for me is an act of mindfulness meditation, spending extended hours focusing on the smallest portion of something that creates happiness and teasing apart what exactly it is that I enjoy so deeply.

In my work I draw inspiration from both everyday modern objects but also from the old masters in the form of capturing dramatic lighting to build an emotional connection with the viewer. By contrasting colourful, joyful objects with deep shadows I invite the viewer to create an emotional connection as well as see these objects on their own, outside of the influence of anything
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Kristine Thompson, Baton Rouge, LA

My creative work examines social and emotional responses to death, how we mourn, and the memorial properties attached to particular objects and spaces as we grieve. My work also increasingly considers how photographs circulate—particularly photographs of death or mourning—and how a photographic image might elicit empathy.

My most recent work, Images Seen to Images Felt, is an on-going series of photograms that I make by pressing light-sensitive gelatin silver print paper up to my laptop screen in the darkroom. They are direct impressions of digital images that I have collected from a range of online newspapers. I turn these virtual images into tangible prints to facilitate a slowed-down way of considering difficult contemporary events that have become too easy to scroll past. Collectively, these photograms become an archive of loss and the grieving that follows.

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Jane Ross, London UK

I am a London-based photographer, interested in discovering and documenting the overlooked, discarded and forgotten, and exploring how photography can help us capture memory, retrieve the past, commemorate the dead and deal with loss. An interest in how we respond and relate to death informs my photographic practice.

London is running out of space to bury its dead. Some cemeteries intend re-using specific graves unless they receive notification from relatives not to do so.  In my recent, ongoing project in Brompton Cemetery – one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ Victorian garden cemeteries – I imagine the past lives and lost souls resting in the graves that will soon be disturbed. Many of the graves are unmarked, decaying and their inscriptions worn away. The lives of those buried there are unknown but they are somehow marked here forever.  I make my images in the cemetery with found photos, then layer and multiexpose in the camera -- letting the play of light and shadow evoke the souls and spirits of the deceased.

I graduated with a Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communications (University of the Arts) in 2015 and although my day job in communications does involve travel and documentary photography, I spend most of my free time on personal photography projects in London and Italy, where I lived for nearly 20 years.

   

 

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Julie Ryder, Australia

I am a visual artist who works across the disciplines of textiles, drawing, digital printing, painting, glass and assemblage. Initially trained in science, I retrained as a textile designer in 1990, and over the past 25 years my arts practice has evolved in response to artistic opportunities and arts residencies, expanding my visual language by working with new media, new challenges and experiences. The materials I work with are an integral part of the message I want to convey, leading to a cross-disciplinary approach in making work for exhibition. I draw inspiration from the history of botany and botanical collectors; gender/social inequity; cross-cultural exchange, objects as receptacles of stories and memory; and the use of natural materials in making art in order to uncover hidden stories that lie between the pages of history. Cryptogams are a major co-collaborator in my work – from imprinting cloths directly with fungi, bacteria and molds in 1995; to working with SEMs of hornwort spores during my 2004 ANAT residency with Dr Christine Cargill, Curator of the Cryptogam Herbarium, Australian National Botanic Gardens. My latest body of work ‘The Hidden Sex’ explores 19th century women seaweed collectors, working across the mediums of textiles, embroidery, cyanotype, glass, seaweed and cuttlefish.

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Kathleen Winter, Verdun, Quebec

I am currently absorbed in a three year project helping transcribe the previously unpublished journals Dorothy Wordsworth (Sister of the poet William Wordsworth) wrote late in life. (Her early journals written in youth are published and famous.) I am doing this for the Wordsworth Trust in the UK. I am also writing a novel based on my findings, to be published by Knopf in 2021. Dorothy Wordsworth was a botanizer in the 19th century amateur tradition, and she collected many mosses, lichen and other specimens, and used a folding botanical microscope invented by the pre-eminent field guide author of her day (Withering). My own studies include sympathetic amateur observation using a powerful magnifier on long walks. I am particularly interested in lichen, fungi and mushrooms. My mushroom interest extends into making medicinal tinctures using homeopathic and spiritual principles as well as nutritional knowledge. I normally walk along the St. Lawrence near my Verdun home, and in the woods of the Eastern Townships, sketching and studying plant life along with Dorothy's writings. The retreat you are proposing would be a wonderful way for me to learn deep things about the mushrooms, lichen and fungi Dorothy knew and loved.

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Suus Agnes Claessen, New Zealand

I am an author-illustrator and comics artist with a background in science communication, literary studies, and beekeeping. My work takes a particular
interest in environmental ethics and the underdog. As a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sustainability, Otago University, New Zealand, I currently work on a graphic novel about human relationships with 'unloved' microcommunities of invertebrates, moss, and fungi. This is part of my interdisciplinary research that explores visual narrative as a method for cultivating attentiveness to nonhumans.

I look for ways to better coexist with my environments through different ways of knowing them —from folklore and myth to traditional and contemporary ecological knowledges— and let these stories colour my daily observations and actions, as I’m learning to read my surroundings intimately; perhaps even communicate with them. Who am I to them? Who responds to the seeds and spores I spread?

By engaging story and sense in processes of getting to know other beings, my creative practice seeks to bring them to wider cultural imaginations. It’s too easy to overlook or disregard them as backdrops to human life. By reviving forgotten wisdoms, I wish to contribute to a broader recognition of nonhumans in all shapes and sizes, not just for their importance and wondrousness, but also as life forms in their own rights, alive and aware, creatures full of story and for who things matter.

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Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

     
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Margaret Haydon, Wyoming

Using primarily ceramic processes, I work with image elements from the natural world, focusing on aspects of current environmental change and the resulting impact on habitat and species populations.  I have worked specifically with sturgeon imagery for the past nine years, depicting the animal in contexts that reference their habitat, history and endangered status.  Through this specific investigation, I have grown increasingly interested in the broader environmental predicament.  While currently the endangered sturgeon species is a central image in my work, other species are beginning to appear. Each day brings a new article highlighting the degradation of various species from sturgeon and shark, to bee, brown bat and golden frog.  We live in the company of animals, often unaware of our effect on their populations.  I am fascinated by the incredible rate at which species arise and disappear.  We are all witnesses now of great, swift changes taking place in our natural world.  With this work I hope to spark a broader thoughtfulness about the impact we are having on our physical environment.

my mother has lost her ability to see only one moon
four ways of looking and more when she takes her glasses off
another and another wrapping around each other dimming with each iteration
 

Samantha (Sammy) Moore, Berthoud, CO

My poetry examines the human condition, and particularly the relationships between the waking human world, and the nocturnal world of the night. An obsessive love of bats quickly became the inspiration to explore night and how people and animals relate to it. Throughout the process of writing the Critical Thesis for my MFA, I developed several experimental embodiment practices, in order to immerse myself in the world of the bats, including inverted writing, night writing experiments, and nocturnal writing practice, wherein all composition took place at night, often outdoors. I am currently continuing work on a poetic manuscript, tentatively titled Nightscapes; this extended landscape poem explores the interplay of humans and what I like to call nightness by presenting various scenes of night that incorporate both the natural and the human world. Not only is the project intended to be a piece of eco-poetry that delves into human relationships with night, it also incorporates themes of Disability Poetics, including sleep disorders and chronic illness. I think the Nocturne residency is the perfect fit for me to further explore the night, its glorious inhabitants, and to utilize scientific resources that may aid the development and creative expansion of my current work.

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Katie St Clair

Foraging for mushrooms has become a meditative practice for me. It is my way of engaging the senses, of absorbing the rush of rich and subtle colors, forms, scents, textures, and tastes that surround me in the woods. My paintings are a reflection of immersion in those environments, an attempt to articulate them in another language, to visualize that which cannot be seen, or described in words. Abstraction of these forms allows me to communicate the complex subtlety of non-linear ecosystems, and the transformative power of encountering them, in all their strangeness, wonder, and awe. When brought to the studio, experimental technique transforms collected fungal forms into unconventional paint texture, while fungal dyes and plant extractions add new elements to my repertoire of art materials. The hunt for colors and new elements found growing--or dying—in the soil keeps pulling me back to the rugged forest terrain.
My solo exhibition “Fruiting Bodies” was featured on Creative Loafing- Charlotte. (https://clclt.com/charlotte/katie-st-clairs-ice-spheres-feature-beauty-decay-and-mushrooms/Content?oid=10731104). I have extensive experience with cross-disciplinary collaborations with scientists, sociologists and naturalists. I recently completed a $50,000 mural commission for Northern Kentucky University’s Health and Innovation Center. The mural focuses on cycles of healing in the native ecosystem.

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Melanie Fisher, Buffalo, NY

My sculptures are organic and otherworldly. With influences from nature and sci-fi, I build large forms that are new hybrids of species, with mixed characteristics from the plant and animal kingdom. By working in a range of scales and mediums, I explore the connections between our micro and macro worlds, imagining the opportunity to discover something previously unknown.

The details in my work focus on the relationship between interior and exterior space, drawing the viewer in for closer inspection. By leaving small anomalies in each piece, I invite the viewer to explore and discover something they’ve never seen. I am currently focusing on round, bulbous forms to reflect fertility, sometimes filling an interior space with hundreds of seeds. My interest in seeds correlates with a current project that will be installed in the Buffalo and Erie Botanical Gardens in Buffalo, New York, during the summer of 2019.

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Dani Dale, Saskatoon, SK

In Dani Dale’s multi-media works she explores the themes of identity, femininity, loss, and the limitations and consequences of established gender roles.  She draws upon personal experience and the death of her mother as well as current issues such as climate change, environmental degradation, and food accessibility.

In opposition to the limits that gender roles place on women, Dale’s body of work strives to be free of such limitations. She works with several mediums and her practice includes but is not limited to sculpture, photography, video, and installation.
In her sculptural work, Dale uses metal and plant life as her primary materials. The tension between the organic and untamed aspects of nature and manufactured structure is the inspiration for her work. Dale addresses this tension on a personal level questioning the constructed form of femininity that is imposed on us as we grow up and the consequences of those impositions. This tension reaches far beyond the personal realm, it can be seen on a global level as we face the reality of the consequences of global degradation and climate change.

Dale’s photography uses barren landscapes printed in cyanotype to address both the barren inner landscape that the imposition of a constructed femininity creates as well as a warning of what is to come on a large scale if we choose to continue seeing ourselves as separate and superior to the earth.

Dale’s exploration of limitation and separation isn’t limited to gender roles. In the final years of her BFA at the University of Saskatchewan, she was the student leader of Usask STEAM; a collaboration among artists and engineers. Usask STEAM created several collaborative works including an installation for Saskatoon’s Nuit Blanche 2016. Inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s multi-disciplinary practice and belief that art is the starting point for social change, collaboration has become an important motivation in her work. She has worked with people from a variety of different disciplines including engineering, drama, and microbiology.

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Markus Haala
, Lowell, MA

What is nature and what is natural? These questions become progressively harder to answer as the impact of human intervention into the ecosphere expands. The same questions inform my interdisciplinary and research- based studio practice, which is committed to explore and survey environmental and ecological systems.
Informed by object-oriented ontology and motivated by critically reviewing naturalistic positions, my work discusses new definitions of nature originating from the Anthropocene, the term for the geological age in which human intervention into the ecosphere has become the foremost influence on climate and environment.

Topics of how we outline, perceive and shape concepts of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, are central aspects that inform my work. I investigate these themes from a viewpoint located at the intersection of post-structuralist theory and the philosophical foundation of contemporary environmental studies. I review existing models of nature, environmentalism and ecology that are generally based on
commonly accepted, representational structures of nature in western history, established by institutions such as museums of natural history. My research results are translated into project-based, conceptual installations that explore the collapsing nature-culture distinction through an examination of materials, images, and sculptural objects. My work engages in both institutional critique as well as the interrogation of our role in shaping the world through augmented technologies. Crossing from sculpture and print media into multifaceted arrangements of assemblages and educational displays, I often work with industrial resources that are part of the ongoing modification of the natural world, including light, (ply)wood, electronics, cast plastics, or metals. All of these components are frequently in dialog with organic matter to underline the dichotomy of object and subject, from a semiotic perspective, when it comes to the question of what nature apparently is, what it is not, and how our understanding often collides with it.

     
   

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Shelly Smith, Expedition Leader
Washington DC

My paintings are based on microscopic life I find in water samples taken from all over the world. My process includes collecting water samples, documenting the site locations, and observing the contents with a laboratory microscope. I work both from direct live observation as well as from a series of videos and pictures I record via my microscope camera.

The work I produce is inspired by the tradition of scientific illustration and popular decorative motifs. Done in pen and ink with gouache washes, the illustrated paintings reflect the protozoa, diatoms, algae, and other microscopic life that lives in abundance, hidden from the naked eye but a vital part of our living world. The jewel like beauty of microorganisms sparkles through in glistening colors and metallic sheen, with bold line work reflecting the outlines of these small creatures under a slide.

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Sophie Durbin, Minneapolis

I am a multidisciplinary artist and curator interested in places, spaces and the body. I am inspired by the infinite capabilities – and horrors – of the nervous system. Other interests that inform my artistic practice include the study of lakes and tides, science-based somatic approaches to massage/bodywork/dance, modern vernacular architecture, medieval art history and idle walks. I have lived in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and currently reside in Minnesota. The landscapes/cityscapes of the Midwest and Great Lakes play a significant part in my work. Ongoing projects include installations and performances situated in the fictional town of Corrty Pye, Michigan and activities & exhibitions at Pancake House, a multipurpose art space in Minneapolis, where I am developing an Early Spring Haptics Lab. The lab will be a series of experimental programs concerning interaction through touch. I am in the preliminary stages of development for a series of programs on limnology in the summer.

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Jamie Ramsay, Chicago

My work combines photography, leatherwork, documentation and natural dying.  My photographic work has focused on the traditional cultures and their arts, sustainable and natural living, and the sustainable food movement.   Since picking up leather craft in the past few years, I’ve become increasingly interested in utilization of organic materials as a return to sustainable production of everyday goods.  I seek to resurrect traditional techniques that phase out environmentally pernicious materials like plastic and make use of materials from the earth.  Creating bags, housewares and functional goods from leather, cork and cotton has become an extension of my artistic practice as a photographer and documentarian.

In 2017, I went to Sweden to learn old world, organic techniques for tanning fish skin.  Fish skin tanning is an old craft that waned in popularity for many reasons, including its connotation of being a necessity for the poor, in lean, pre-war times.   However, it’s a less land-taxing form of leather, equal in strength to bovine leather, which also makes use of food production waste material.  Its sustainability has been a focus of my work in the last year.  I would like to research the aquatic environment to inform fish tanning and expand my work in more closed loop systems of creation that make beautiful, responsible and utilitarian materials from the sea.

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Jennifer Croney Chernak, Philadelphia

Painting for me is similar to a contemplative hike, where attention to footing and vistas stretch my thoughts away from the busyness of everyday happenings. My landscape paintings are done outside, and my still lifes include the outdoors as seen through a window. My subject matter can include wind, heat, cold, rain, and sunlight -- all of which are of an essence not as solid as a tree or rock. This along with a bold use of color and energetic lines add an abstract feel to my work. Through my paintings, I honor fresh air and the freedom of expressing without formulas and the noise of technology. I begin a painting by establishing general shapes and gestures to show movement. Each layer of acrylic paint records moments in terms of light, shadows, and impacts from weather. The accumulation of layers reflects the passage of time. In the final stages of each painting, I make adjustments that become my emotional imprint. Such changes can include calming a space or adding definition to bring forth an area. The painting evolves and becomes a representation of the entanglement of nature and personal intention.

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Susan Murrell
, Oregon

My creative practice has recently focused on the universal and personal process of experiencing presence through absence— a struggle to know a thing from the hole it has left behind after it is gone. I am interested in finding fullness in the void and recognizing meaning or purpose in the space between. Considering the moral/cultural implications of negative and positive space(s) I aim to confuse the two. It is perhaps a small shift in perspective, but it has become an important inversion for me.

My work explores how our concept of landscape has changed through technology. The horizon traditionally defined our relationship to the world; now with our expanding perspective, we feel a kinship with microscopic images and aerial views of planets. Vestiges of built environments, architecture, or even graphic design and remnants of popular culture have been added to our visual language and create for us a sense of place. In this context, I consider myself a landscape painter.

 

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Sidi Chen, Vancouver

 I was born on the shoreline of southeastern China by the Pacific and raised up among the Fuquan people –the people of “Giving back to the water from where we harvest”. Water has thus become the material of home, the habitat of the soul, and inspiration of art for me.  I’ve been travelling transcontinental the past 10 years, along the Pacific coasts, across Canada to the Atlantic Ocean, paddling down the Yukon River, and over hundreds of ponds, rivers, and lakes. Everywhere I go, I am drawn to the mythologies, tales, customs, rituals, knowledge, studies, and environmental issues of the water resources and the human and non-human communities. For me, water is the physical body that reflects the states of cultures and well beings of the residents in its watershed territories.

As a body archiving artist who uses the body as the unit of measurements, the device of receptions, storage of experiences, and translator of arts, I take every chance to throw myself into the water and merge into its system. I desire to learn its language, tempers, emotions, and the relationship between water and the creatures of its nurturing.

 

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Barbara Bushey, Michigan

My work is an exploration of what is hidden and what is revealed—whether in a visual, emotional or historical sense. Working with layers, both physically and visually, allows me to explore this complexity.

In making quilts inspired by the Great Lakes, I used ancient shibori techniques to create images of rocks and water. The repetitive motions required of the techniques echo the repetitive motions of the Great Lake’s waves hitting the shore. The infinite variety of each unique wave and stitch is absorbed into the constant and enduring whole.

I am very excited to learn more about water, in all its different forms, and in the ways others interact with this precious resource. Water is life.

     
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Shannon Amidon, Expedition Leader
Portland, Oregon

Drawn to the alchemical nature of the process, I use the ancient medium of encaustic (molten beeswax) and often incorporate organic, upcycled and cast off materials to create my mixed media pieces. I love using materials that have a nostalgic, pensive, or mysterious feeling. I have a strong emotional connection to well-worn objects that have been through many hands. Sometimes I feel the essence of their history reflected in my art. My subject matter includes a variety of natural history elements including insects, trees, botanicals, seed pods, and birds as well as ancient symbolism and geometry. My artwork explores the cycles of life, calling attention to its transitory and fragile nature. I’m enthralled and intrigued by the natural sciences, and I feel that especially in this technology-driven age we need reminders of the briefness of life and wonders of the natural world. Broadly my artwork explores themes of nature, science and our environmental impact. The cycles of life, death and impermanence play a primary role in my work.  By interlacing science, art and reminiscence I strive to create pensive and familiar images that transport the viewer to another time and place, evocative of a moment filled with exploration, wonder and discovery.
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Jennie Clark, Ontario

Jennie Clark is an active visual artist, art educator and student of natural science.
Jennie worked professionally as a graphic designer, art director and illustrator for twenty years, following graduation with honours from Ontario College of Art (OCADU). In 2006 she expanded her knowledge of contemporary art practices and graduated with honours from Georgian College Advanced Fine Art program, receiving awards for printmaking and sculpture. Her imagery is inspired by natural phenomena and an innate connectivity to the natural world, often revealed in layering and use of organic materials.

Jennie is the originator of the Simcoe Watershed Art Project, an artist collective focused on bringing artists together to express their interest in the beauty, diversity and concern for the lands and waters encircling Lakes Simcoe and Couchiching.
She offers watercolour and printmaking workshops and classes and has enjoyed presenting at the MacLaren Art Centre,Barrie; Barrie Art Club, Barrie, Quest Gallery, Midland, the Town of Innisfil and Orillia Museum of Art and History.

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Nancy Yule

The aroma of melting beeswax. Intoxicating. Playing with fire. Seductive. Coaxing wax to alter its form; solid to liquid and back again, is what I love to do. The term encaustic means to burn in. Encaustic Wax. The combination of beeswax combined with damar resin, fused in countless layers. An enduring art medium with an unequivocal lustre and richness. I am humbled with the complexity of this organic material and am privileged to create artwork with it.

I work intuitively building layers of shape, colour, symbolism and abstract composition. I love blending the warmth of fibre with the encapsulation of hardened encaustic wax to reveal an unique mergence of mediums. Always challenging myself with breaking tradition and exploring new material combinations.

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Mara Eagle, Montreal, QC

Through a combination of video, sound and installation, I explore the ways in which Western philosophy and science have formulated a concept of nature through discursive, methodological and representational means. Focusing on the production and consumption of spectacle, I turn to feminist theory and the history of painting to probe how 'the gaze' usually spoken of in relation to depictions of female bodies, can be mapped onto the scientific observation of natural phenomena. For example because nature is often personified as a woman, ‘unlocking’ and ‘revealing’ its ‘secrets’ and ‘hidden treasures’ carries explicitly erotic and fetishistic undertones. Likewise, the gendered metaphors so frequently inscribed into accounts of wildlife behavior harness nature as a kind of looking glass that naturalizes social norms. In examining this relationship, I wonder how do visualization technologies (microscopes, telescopes, cameras, etc.) inform ways of seeing and relationships structured by paradigms of sight?

Nature documentaries, botanical gardens, illustrated atlases, and encyclopedic museums provide visual reservoirs informing the vocabulary of my practice. I am interested in televised representations of nature in mainstream media, where it is often polarized into two extreme categories. While on the one hand associated with sites of disaster in the fall out of hurricanes, fires, floods, etc., on the other hand, landscapes are iconic in commercials promoting luxury travel, health and relaxation. Whether the agent of sublime destruction or the sanctuary for spiritual wellness, landscape imagery circulates with charged significance. 

The project I set for myself is to make work that operates exuberantly on an aesthetic level. Collage is a core dimension of my practice, facilitating cross-contamination between the realms of popular culture, scientific vernaculars, the Internet and technology industries. Working with green-screen allows me to force conflicting information together in enigmatic ways that never resolve and are often humorous. In the midst of an environmental crisis, my work speaks to the philosophical underpinnings of the categories of the natural, the human and the feminine, exploring how through modes of representation these concepts are circulated.

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Amanda Besl, Buffalo, NY

I am interested in the arbitrary curation of gardening and the warfare that ensues from these choices. Frothing bubbles fade to reveal porcelain rose petals macerated and mangled by the bejeweled and ethereal bobbing corpses of drowning Japanese beetles. They tread water in the murky deathtrap of a liquid measuring cup, suggested by the round panel of the oil painting that straddles simultaneous attraction and repulsion, hyperrealism and abstraction. This duality causes both rational and irrational distinctions and subconscious prejudices to bob to the surface of our awareness. Beautiful and repulsive they exist together for a liminal time, a slow read that can’t be unread.

My process began while tending my own garden and escorting these beautiful marauders to their soapy tomb. This work is a departure from early work exploring botanical debris visible through the translucent ‘skin’ of plastic yard waste bags. I liken these paintings to America’s current turbulent political climate, in which distinctions become lost in confusion and distortion.

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Joanne Price, Bagdad, Kentuky

In my studio practice, I explore multiple solutions to resolve problems or questions presented. Printmaking’s multiple nature allows me to create different versions of the same image on different paper, with different colors, collaged, and in sculptural form. My ideas often emerge from folk/fairy tales, everyday life, science, and nature — often explored through series. A long-term artist’s book project, Beneficial Insects, has stretched my skills and helped me reconnect with my love of nature while refining my ideas through research, experimentation, careful composition, and varied presentation (book, print, installation, sculpture). Utilizing micro and macro perspectives I strive to connect art and science in a way that I hope pushes past mere illustration.

I inevitably come across a very interesting avenue to explore during the research or execution phase of my ideas. I like to stay open to these side journeys because they are often experimental and important in finding new ways to express my ideas or to look at what I am doing with fresh eyes. The piece Arilus Cristatus Epoch was directly influenced by Maria Sibylla Merian’s work and illustrates an attempt to make connections between insects, earth, sky and human activities

 

 

     
    2019
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  Alyssa Ellis, Expedition Leader
Alberta

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

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Naomi Renouf, Channel Islands

As a textile artist and painter, I am constantly inspired and awed by the beauty of the natural environment. Although most of my work is a reflection of the coast, the countryside and the flora of my native island, I have travelled widely and produced work representing many different locations.

My work is an expression of my emotional reaction to what I see in a world we should be taking better care of. I strive to produce something which is more than simply a visual representation of the subject matter. I take photographs as a reference but usually rely mostly on the images inside my head and by utilising these, the tactile and visual qualities of the materials I use and also the unpredictable things that occur during the process, I can interact with the work in a spontaneous way.

I sometimes work with textiles alone and occasionally I just use paint but at other times I combine the two. Painting has influenced the way in which I approach textiles and conversely the way that I paint has been affected by my use of textiles. For me, the tactile qualities of textiles can often say more than paint alone.

 

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Laara Cerman, British Columbia

Laara Cerman’s work explores the intersection of art, science, history and the themes of impermanence, a return to nature, and the fragility of life. She creates her photographs by capturing multiple digital images and then pieces them together in postproduction, a skill she has mastered through working as a freelance retoucher in the commercial photography industry. 

Currently, she creates her digital images using a regular, flatbed, office scanner rather than a sophisticated camera. Paradoxically, the crude scanner produces images that appear hyper-real in part due to their macro and larger-than-life clarity that emphasizes extreme detail one would normally have difficulty seeing with the naked eye. The images have an extremely narrow depth of field and low luminosity, an affect that cannot be achieved directly through studio lighting or with a camera. This makes the subject appear floating in a black void of space, creating a feeling akin to a momento mori.

She is currently focused on documenting the wild plants of British Columbia for one of her more recent series Codex Pacificus.

 

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Jo Tito, New Zealand

I am a full time Māori artist, indigenous to Aotearoa, NZ. My creativity is a collaboration with nature and my ongoing project Earth - Water - Light - Stone is a merging of nature with photography, paint, words and digital media to share stories of connection that speak for the environment and for humanity.

My current projects include: Walking in Circles - a creative collaboration with Inuit artist
and film-maker Stacey Aglok and an ongoing relationship with Intercreate - an organisation that nurtures art, science, technology collaborations with a focus on environmental issues.

I am also a passionate gardener! I document the growing of my garden through words and photography which you can see on Instagram or Facebook . My garden is my spiritual space for healing, reflection, learning and creativity - everything is there. Many of my ideas and learning come from growing my garden and contemplating with nature. I
also have a small nursery at home where I grown native trees for regeneration and many medicinal plants both native to Aotearoa and of other lands. I value my Taranaki and Te Arawa ancestral roots. I am inspired by the lives that my ancestors lived and the inspiration that they lived with nature. They had such a respect for nature that is intrinsic and deeply embedded in our art forms and language. Our language is so beautiful, it all connects back to nature and so I draw on this knowledge in my quest to create art that speaks for the environment.

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Rocio Graham, Calgary

I have always been connected to the land and I find comfort working with nature in my art practice; this connects me to home and defines my identity. Inspired by artists like Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jan De Heem, and other Dutch still life masters; the garden is my muse.

Most of my work starts the moment I plant a seed and continues as I nurture it through the stages of maturity, flowering, and decay when it becomes soil for future plants. Mine is a labour intensive process that allows me to explore the landscape as a physical and mystical space where time and nature become my creative allies. I use organic materials that are methodically planned, nursed, and harvested according their aesthetic qualities for later use in my compositions; similar to how a painter uses pigments to create. From seed to harvest, to the creation of a still life, a year can pass. Allowing time to pass keeps me attuned to nature’s cycles. I have found many parallels between the landscape and my inner garden; an inner landscape that shifts and ebbs with the seasons.

Rocio Graham is a photographer currently based in Calgary. Born in Mexico, she emigrated to Canada in 2002, studying art at Emily Carr University and the Alberta University of the Arts (ACAD), where she recently obtained a Bachelor of Design in Photography. Her still lives are influenced by her cultural heritage, experiences as a woman and mother, trauma survivor and reflections on life cycles. She explores the landscape from a body engagement perspective where labour, mysticism, and temporality merge. Rocio was selected as a finalist in the Womankind photographers award in Australia. After graduation, she was nominated for the BMO 1st Art invitational competition and has received various scholarships and grants. She is currently a mentor for the ACADSA Hear/d Art Residency. She is represented by Christine Klassen Gallery.

 

Anna’s hummingbird takes 250 breaths per minute when at rest, her heart beating 1,220 times per minute during flight. In her tiny body. The haze from the fires. So thick this air. Her flight the brightest light. This afternoon. Her lungs working harder than her wings.
 


Kyo Maclear
, Toronto

In 2017, I published a hybrid memoir titled Birds Art Life (Doubleday Canada.) My challenge in writing this book was to focus on the small, unspectacular and the non-pristine. I wanted to test the boundaries of nature writing—what is it? Who does it? Who is it for? For example, one constraint I set myself was to do all my nature trekking within the boundaries of Toronto. I was hoping to tap people into the understory of the city. The invisible, all that we cannot see, is very attractive to me. I’ve come to realize we grasp only a tiny fraction of what’s actually going on around us—and this is to our, and the living world’s, great detriment. It’s not an exaggeration to say we are disastrously disconnected from the more-than-human living world.

The book I ended up writing is structured around excursions with a unique nature guide—a musician named Jack Breakfast. Over the next 12 months, as I accompanied him through seasonal shifts and migrations, on a shambly odyssey around the city, through lousy weather and near-accidents, I began to learn the names of the birds I saw. For the first time in my life, I felt myself tangibly connected to the elements and the wild side of the city. I began to wonder if the core lessons of birding could be applied to other aspects of life.

Writing the book made me think more deeply about friendship and the possibility of taking our time and giving our time freely to each other. It also made me think about ‘bird time’ as opposed to ‘survival time’. And by ‘survival time’ I mean the time of ‘not stopping,’ of ceaseless agitation in servicing one’s precarious occupation. ‘Self-optimising’… ‘Faster better stronger’… I think what risks becoming completely trivial and almost incommunicable amid the haste of our historical moment is the feeling that arises when we pass time together—say, for instance, in a “Parliament of Owls”. I am interested in reflecting on what happens when we become bounded together, temporally, in a community, when we come to love and fight for things together that are other than or greater than our individual selves and self-interests.

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Jane Tingley, Kitchener, ON

At its core – my installation practice is as concerned with traditional sculptural questions such as the coherence of materiality and the arrangement of objects in space, as it is with the viewers’ embodied experience as they engage with the art work. I am interested in creating environments that function metaphorically, in discovering new ways of addressing embodiment, and thinking about how the body can have meaningful interactions with technological environments or systems. I use materiality and the physicality of the installation as a metaphor, and create sensory rich environments that allow for meaning to emerge through experience and exploration.

Alongside my Installation practice I have also work collaboratively on different projects
including wearable robotics, gestural games, and my recent Internet of Things inspired
distributed sculpture. These new works draw on expertise from multiple disciplines in an effort to create aesthetic experiences that push the boundaries of interactivity and playfulness, and offer an experience to the viewer that is accessible both intellectually and technologically.

Beyond my studio practice I also curate exhibitions. My curatorial interests lie in showing work that critically engages with technology and its intersection with human experience. I am equally interested in interdisciplinary collaboration as impetus for critical creation, as I am in the aesthetics of interaction between the art object and the participant/viewer.

 

     
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Michelle Bunton, Expedition Leader
Ontario, Canada

Rooted in a space of paradox, my practice attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video or sound record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body/psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations, my work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another in a perseverance towards preservation. My practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” which is defined as an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. I consider technology-based archives to occupy this intermediate reality, offering a critical venue through which to examine larger themes, such as gender, sexuality, death and decay.

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Annie Dunning, Guelph, Ontario

Our relationship with nature is messy. I feel an affinity to Donna Haraway’s ideas of Staying with the Trouble (2016, Duke University Press). My work does not offer answers for how we should interact with other creatures in this compromised environment; instead, I try to expand areas of commonality through observations and small discoveries that can, through lateral thinking, indicate a mutual effect of one upon another. I would like to position human and more-thanhuman relationships as adaptive collaborations: developing on a parallel course and mutually influencing the developments of one another. It is clear that we have an impact on the species around us, how in turn are we affected by them?

In my work, I examine intersecting elements of culture and the so-called natural world, conflated to create new, hybrid ideas. Through my multidisciplinary practice, I explore what greater possibilities flora, fauna and fungi might hold if released from their expected roles. I find the grey areas between the human world and the cultures of other species to be fascinating spaces for speculation. Using a project-based approach to making, I confuse conventional hierarchies by playing with the interconnections and interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world. Over the past ten years, sound has become an integral component of my work.

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Tara Dougans, Montreal

I am a Montréal-based artist whose work explores inner and outer reflections of the natural world; my intention is to cultivate sensitivity and space within the body in order to attune more fully to waking experience. Understanding the body as instrument, and experience as harmonic, I am fascinated by soundscape ecology (the relationship between emotional intelligence and environmental intelligence) and the pre or paraverbal. What is the experience (space remembered) of the space between, before, words? How can working with voice, breath and silence reflect and/or spark hidden relationships between what we see and what we know? And how does that intuitive sense of knowing inform what and how we see ?

The interplay between my painting and moving-image work is an exercise towards listening to, performing, recording and/or translating unseen (unheard) soundscapes through self-intuited process. Self-taught as a filmmaker and oriented towards the immediacy of hand-based media, resonance communication, deep listening, high sensory registration and enquiry into the unseen but somehow, somewhere known, guide process and response.

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Kelly Markovich, Dartmouth, NS

Kelly Markovich is an interdisciplinary artist, interested in photography, sound, textiles, installation and mixed media.

Using memory and storytelling as a catalyst, personal or shared, much of Kelly’s work has predominantly focused on large-scale photographic images printed and displayed on unconventional materials like Tyvek (a breathable, membranous material used in the house building process). Slightly skewed and altered, various means are used to disrupt the convention of “what we know” by way of digital manipulation, stitching, suturing, and playing with scale, weight, and the arrangement of common domestic objects. The objects are presented within a space creating tension, which serves to represent that which is familiar, yet simultaneously strange and unfamiliar or “unheimlich”.

Thematically, Kelly’s work depicts relationships, story, and shared memory as it relates to loss, permanence, presence, and absence. Kelly is interested in collective memory and trauma, and the act of healing through the sharing of oral traditions. More recently she has begun to honour the domestic cultural skills that were passed down from the Serbian matriarch of her family lineage and invite hand needlework such as embroidery, petit point, and knitting into her art practice. Rooted in research and steeped in tradition, this process showcases the fleetingness of life and the importance of story on our own identities and histories.

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Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

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Dominika Ksel, Brooklyn

I’m an interdisciplinary artist, activist, educator, psychonaut and investigator of invisible landscapes. My works are an ecosystem that gently deconstruct power and materiality, while exploring the interstices of consciousness, myth, science and feminism. These information networks are presented as video installations, interactive sculptures and paintings, and sound-based performances providing a tangible glimpse of various invisible phenomena, and illuminating how these imperceptible structures influence the human condition and our larger quantum reality. 

As a trained hypnotist, media researcher and archivist, I use primary research, tests, interviews and analysis to form playful and peculiar experiences, physical objects and psychoacoustic compositions. 

Through the methodology of psychonautics, I describe and explore the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness through modes such as sensory deprivation, hypnosis, meditation, sound and breath entrainment. Thus creating access and mapping information often missed due to the technologically overactive and chaotic contemporary existence drowned out by the anthrophony.

Within the systems of visual and audio works, I subvert symbols of violence and disparity through a sci-fi lens and psycho-physical language, unpacking and searching for a way to heal and explore traumas caused by a capitalist framework that has encouraged white supremacy, patriarchy, dehumanization and ecocide.

 

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Clara Laratta, Hamilton, ON

My work explores how our experience with nature influences the way we see and interact with the world. It deals with issues of identity and is an exploration into understanding the way people behave. I find that no matter how often I stray from nature, it always enters into some aspect of my work. I am constantly questioning what it means to be human, how our experiences shape who we are and the way we see the world. Examination of these matters help me understand why people behave the way they do and how life circumstances and our experiences change us, allowing us to grow or wither. Positive impacts from human interactions with nature is of great interest.

Images are created through the execution of photographic self-portraits, images that explore subtle changes in the perception and portrayal of self. They reflect the impact of day to day experiences and interactions with others and our natural environment.     The works are based on an intimate look at self while holding a space for a look at “others” in a broader context.  Manual layering of physical properties being photographed allow many facets of research to come together in one image. 

The use of self-portraits in my work is serendipitous to someone who has an aversion to being photographed. As a female, the control and ability to represent myself as the subject rather than an object is appealing to me.  No matter what the intervention, similar to nature when it is unleashed, control is lost.  The history of photography, its ties to the history of portraiture and the new genre of selfies is also of interest and provides an opportunity for dialogue with a wide audience.  The way we live our life has meaning. The way we interact with one another and the environment leaves an impact whether we are aware of it or not. The way we interpret the world provides interest in our experience, an opportunity for discussion, and enables us each to have a unique connection to one another and our community.

     

 

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Julya Hajnoczky, Expedition Leader
Calgary, Alberta

The extraordinary details of the natural world never fail to amaze me. The quiet work of plants, animals and insects, so easily ignored by humans, is what interests me the most, and what I constantly return to for inspiration. Much of my work is a sort of meditation on the interactions between people and nature, on the ways in which we attempt to control and codify nature, yet hold ourselves as somehow separate. My pieces attempt to frame the work of plants and animals in terms that are easier for humans to understand, and potentially empathize or identify with. I hope to inspire a sense of wonder or fascination, and encourage the viewer to consider the energy and resources that go into the constant cycle of building and decay in complex environments and ecosystems.
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Adrian Göllner, Ottawa

I need to become a better birder. I am currently amidst the second year of a conceptual art project in which I take note of every bird I see. My art practice involves the transcription of sound, time and motion into visual forms. Recently, this has manifested in attempts to cast explosions in bronze, but this body of work began more gently as experiments in which traces of the past were conjured out of analogue technologies and given form as drawings. In 2017 I began to make lists of all the birds I saw in the day. Conceiving of my avian neighbours as a collective canary-in-the-coalmine for the environment, I thought I might begin to be able to discern patterns that portend something of our shared future. Making visual the ambient presence of birds within our midst certainly accords with nature of my practice, but the resulting exhibition - All the Birds I Saw Last Year – went further to make evident the need to observe and respect environment. My year of dedicated bird observation has only increased my desire to know more about birds.

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Johanna Householder, Toronto

I like to say that I work at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture – in video, performance art, audio and choreography. My interest in how ideas move through bodies has led my often collaborative practice, and I am keenly interested in techniques of embodiment, and the histories of live art as contained between archives and repertoires. Lately, the debate around how to name the present epoch, whether from a scientific or science fictional perspective has compelled me to reconsider a repositioning of ourselves as agents in the world: Holocene, Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene (as Donna Haraway would have it) can assist us humans in the critically needed recognition of ourselves as only one of many animalia… and relative newcomers at that. As we collectively rethink our positions in relation to “the land” and its discontents, artistic practice has a key role to play in conceiving of alternatives to representations of other species that split “semiotic” from “material” reality. I want to work on alternative futures – and pasts – using listening and choreography as research methods. I have been working inside an image of the bird.

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Mariana Gabarra Tavares Reis Teixeira, Brasil

For me, art is a way of life. It is a way to face life with curiosity, imagination and creativity. It is to transform and to be transformed. I love to be surprised by the beauty, tenderness and complexity of the daily life. Humankind and nature are two subjects that really move me and keep me intrigued. Nature - with its mixture of colors, textures, patterns, and the individuality that each living thing carries in their own – is very inspiring. The human way of expression, especially in the traditional cultures, is another theme for me. Wherever I go I try to learn from locals some crafting techniques and the history behind it. My work comes as elaborations of all these experiences. I like to explore in my creation process different supports and mediums - such as painting, photography and embroidery. Since I’ve settled my studio in a coffee farm surrounded by legal reserves, I became more aware of preservation and sustainability. I’m constantly looking for disposable materials on my surroundings and then challenge myself to incorporate them inmy work. My last series, for example, is made of used coffee sieves.

     

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Miriam Sagan, Santa Fe

     I am a poet, not a naturalist, but my poetry often creates a “map” of a place, incorporating geography, geology, archeology, ecology, natural history, memory, and perception. I am interested in borders, what earthworks artist Robert Smithson calls “The Slurb,” the collision between the human made and the wild.
       I recently completed a book entitled “Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn.” It was published by Sherman Asher Press in fall, 2012. The seven places were the start of a journey to create a land-based or site-specific. poetry. It began in 2006,  as a writer-in-residence at Everglades National Park. The next place was THE LAND/An Art Site in Mountainair, New Mexico. I started with a long poem which then  result in a low-impact sculpture, a poetry pamphlet and postcard, and several lectures in galleries and academic settings. In 2009 I had a residency in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. This Petrified Forest residency led directly to the production of a poetry postcard series of Three Views of the Painted Desert, which I donated to the park.   

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Jenna Buckingham, Philadelphia

I am a visual artist living in Philadelphia. I have enjoyed the adventurous life of a transplant since age 13, but it has given me a strange perspective on the idea of home. It seems that the creation of home is both desperate and idealistic. We make shelter with clumsy hands and unsure technique. But the flaws in these structures do open a space for desire. My work has a couple different manifestations. Through two dimensional pieces, enlarged photographic collages mix portions of generic and personal imagery, contending with the viewer’s orientation. Through three-dimensional works, objects and photographs meet in unexpected ways. The work usually involves the manipulation of regular household materials to create odd shapes, playing on the threshold between confusion and recognition.

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Shelly Smith, Seatle

My paintings are based on microscopic life I find in water samples taken from all over the world. My process includes collecting water samples, documenting the site locations, and observing the contents with a laboratory microscope. I work both from direct live observation as well as from a series of videos and pictures I record via my microscope camera.

The work I produce is inspired by the tradition of scientific illustration and popular decorative motifs. Done in pen and ink with gouache washes, the illustrated paintings reflect the protozoa, diatoms, algae, and other microscopic life that lives in abundance, hidden from the naked eye but a vital part of our living world. The jewel like beauty of microorganisms sparkles through in glistening colors and metallic sheen, with bold line work reflecting the outlines of these small creatures under a slide.

I’m interested in the microcosmos, the unseen engine of life in our word that keeps creation digesting food, making oxygen, returning to dust, and springing forth anew. From blastocyst to decomposition bacteria, we’re all a bunch of beautiful, cycling cells.

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Meg Nicks, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me.
Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To
be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

 

rotutnick   Robyn Crouch, Montreal

The imagery and symbols that come through Robyn's work encourage one's gaze inward to the cellular realms. There, one discovers playful depictions of chemical processes; they are the basis for the macrocosm, and our human consciousness becomes an interface between the seen and the unseen worlds.

In her functional ceramic work, the influence of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony encourages moments of contemplation. The viewer-participant can loose her or his train of thought while meandering through considerately composed collages of geometries, molecules, plants, and creatures, all woven together by strands of double-helical DNA. A flash of recognition. A momentary mirror.

A goal in this work is balance and harmony between the form, and the micro-mythologies encircling it. Moments of personal ritual in daily life beget even deeper, more conscious presence. Little by little over time we gain insight into what makes us tick.

Robyn’s goal is to provide a platform (however small), on which to rest, and off of which to launch forays into the luscious and potent realms of imagination, self-inquiry, and discovery during moments of solitude and engaged contemplation. So let us celebrate alone and together!

     

 

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Katrina Vera Wong, Vancouver

When people ask what I do, I tell them I make flowers. And I call them Frankenflora .
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “What If You Slept”, a “strange and beautiful flower” is plucked from a dream in heaven and brought back to our waken world. Years after I first read this poem, after I volunteered at an herbarium, after I became fascinated with the mutability of orchids, after I lost my father, did I begin to understand just how strange and beautiful that flower was. In my grief, I was plunged into a frenzy of piecing together parts of dead flora to create—or replicate—Coleridge’s poetic flower.

I consult the study of botany and experiment with the concept of hybridization, using sections of pressed or dried plants to construct a flower, like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. That hybrid speciation is more commonly found in plants than animals makes them the ideal media for this practice, so Frankenflora (with its variations given binomial names) may represent a species that is perhaps not altogether impossible.

We are born into this world the product of two genetic codes, but along the way we pick up bits of the people we love and bits of the things we marvel at, and in the end we leave as a whole greater than the sum of these parts. It is my hope that Frankenflora might be a balm for those who have also lost loved ones, that they might be a part of the departed to occupy the void left behind.

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Yannick De Serre, Montreal

Yannick De Serre’s work is today strongly influenced by his stay in northern Quebec. Always refined, his different series testifies of the emptiness, death, calmness and the northern landscapes; through a minimalist aestheticism.

In his landscapes, above the horizon, the sky comes to life with some occasional aurora borealis, for which the artist blur the limits between the background and the form, using embossing to suggest the fluidity of the movement of this natural phenomenon. The rare appearances of color are always soft and discreet, and add a touch of life in the serenity of the work. This apparent tranquility is however fragile, as a storm on the horizon threats to topple this quiet landscape into turmoil.

Lately, Yannick work on a corpus of art talking about suicidal and death. It involved people around him. They had to think about what they would leave behind them, if they would kill themself. He started to receive fake suicidal letters. Then, for each of them, he drawed a funeral bouquet.

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Ashley J. Ortiz-Diaz, Florida

My concern is to confront the viewer with a scene that is serene, yet unsettled, in order to incite a reevaluation of a proposed reality. Removing spatial planes from perspectival references (reality) allows the mind to create its own reference points. When that plane does not logically align with the edge of the picture and is furthermore made dimensional or dynamic according to unknown laws, the simple and familiar is made uncanny and other-worldly. Evoking a hole, a thin veil or perhaps a bed, the plane(s) subtly transforms within the soft grey atmospheric surroundings. The work is a representation of what it is to confront and contemplate mortality.

The underlying denial of mortality in the Western middle-class is, in part, the reason for a fear of death and a refusal to prepare for it. Death discourse should be normalized and part of our daily lives so that when we are confronted with death, we have the vocabulary and resources to die well. Through my practice, I hope to create an inviting space to discuss conception of death.

 

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Erin Williamson, Toronto, Ontario

I like to work with found objects and exploit the colors and textures that are inherent to the materials. All of the materials I work with are chosen carefully to depict a sense of safety and struggle relating to the human body and the comfort it provides us and limits us to. I want to create a sense of nostalgia for a safe space provided by the physical womb as well as the struggle that comes with coping with our inevitable expulsion from this ephemeral place. Along with that I also portray a sense of self-repulsion that comes with my own personal constant need for comfort and validation provided by others.

My favorite material to work with is nylon and I incorporate in all of my work. I appreciate its translucent nature and the neutral tone of the material as well as how it can stretch and tear to create a sense of struggle. I like the color pink because it allows me to abstractly reference the human body and its internal organs, specifically the uterus, through man-made materials. This is why I manipulate rigid found objects into more organic shapes to create a juxtaposition between what is natural and what is not. I see all the different objects as individual pieces with unique identities working together to create a larger entity and give the viewer a sense of security. I also appreciate the idea of pink being considered a “feminine” color because I want to exploit this binary idea and express a sort of delicacy in my work through that. For me this delicacy represents something that is inherent to our being as humans who experience emotion in unique ways. My sculptures are very fragile and easy to take down. In this way they are very ephemeral and once taken apart can never be reassembled in the same way. The moment we are born we are vulnerable, pushed out of a space that kept us safe and in which I constantly long to seek the same sort of comfort and safety found within that space.

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Alivia Magana, Albuquerque

Through the medium of photography, Alivia Magana explores topics related to the
medical field, the human body, specimen-hood, mortality and identity. Her interest originates from her experience working as an Morphology Technician that assists with autopsies. Through picturing objects related to autopsy, personal protective equipment and bodily fluids, she uses the camera as a mediator between this confidential realm and reflects on her experiences in autopsy.

     
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Raimundo Nenen, Chile

After the publication of my first book of poetry at age 16, I crossed out my authorship
and disappeared behind multiple heteronyms, getting involved in various art and
everyday life collective projects. I celebrated the immanence writing poems and
drawing with chalk in the walls just before the rain. The artist dissolves in his art
and the art dissolves in the world. Worldly Art.

Draw attention to the alienation of human culture in general, and art in particular,
from our world (Earth); and to the consequences of this alienation. Rebind the
human body and culture with its territories. Bioregionalism as art. The exploration
of ourselves, our bodies, as geofacts: Intemperización.

And pornomancy: the dissolution of the fundamental binary categories of alienation
(and the imperial politics): the public and the private, through the intímate. To
intímate. To intimídate.

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Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Montreal

A phenomenon of being caught in-between the present and the past. This is what I essentially represent within durational art forms, mostly moving images. I am interested in visual transformation of ordinary objects and scapes into the state of being abstract as a lucid dream. It paradoxically awakens the linear perception of viewers and myself. The banal-becoming-abstract of video-making revitalizes the past moments captured in moving images in a site where audiences meet the pieces. Audiences’ imagination subjectively recreates the opaque imagery of what my own durational realm stimulates, based on their past and present.

With the long-existing values in my artworks, I have recently been shifting to be interested in
the decomposition of materials. Since a human perception is held by the way of seeing which I would call subjective framing, the ideas of reframing and recomposing my visuals as objective materials have been my major experimental subjects. Even though moving-images end up being caught in the audiovisual world, a single moving-image seizes potentials to turn into different substances as shown by an individual. In another word, there is no solid moving-image for my artistic belief that the dead moving-image is surely capable of returning alive in potential ways.

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Allison Hunter, Houston TX

In my work the camera becomes a writing tool that records daily activities as a way to reference memories and poetic moments in time. I insert these moments into my work through video editing techniques and through projecting onto interior and exterior spaces as well as objects. In my past, I have presented my videos in a variety of ways, including guerrilla-style night projections, site-specific outdoor installations, and as part of a collaborative performance.

My interest in the “Submerged” residency stems from a new artistic focus on water, including the scarcity of drinking water and the effects of natural disasters such as flooding. Last fall, I lived through the effects that Hurricane Harvey had on the people, pets, and infrastructure of the city of Houston. I am planning a new series of video projections dealing with the trauma of that experience.

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Kathryn Cooke, Alberta

As a long standing resident of the mountain community of Canmore, Alberta, as well as residing in the Columbia Valley Wetlands, outdoor spaces and in particular, the water systems of the Bow River and Columbia River, are exceedingly important to me. The subjects I choose to depict in my art are thus largely mined from these natural environments. My current artwork is also greatly influenced by my affinity for textiles. My drawing based works of art are painterly in the application of material however conceptually I am interested in weaving elements of our natural world together within a composition. The weave with its ins and outs, as well as its ups and downs, is a metaphor of life. The weaving together of different elements of life allows me to introduce a dialogue of relationships.
Water is critical to the existence of life. Life, whether plant or animal, human or other-than-human, is molded and shaped by the presence or absence of water. My  work  depicts relationships that living beings have with water and how our lives are intertwined and dependent on it.  I have explored this relationship using a variety of media including fiber  works,  mixed media and video/sound. At this critical time in our earthly existence, I feel strongly regarding all of our roles in preserving and protecting the health of our life giving water systems. My work thus extends beyond the immediate visual aesthetic to conceptual ideas of our relationships with the natural world.  

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Lauren Ruiz, New York

Lauren Ruiz is a research based multimedia artist addressing ecological contamination and the corrosive effects of human activity. She is currently focusing on the amount of artificial materials that exist with human cells, and human adaptation and evolution in the age of the Anthropocene.

Ruiz’s work analyzes the social, biological and political effects of non biodegradable materials. Working within a climate fiction, specifically under the guise of a fictive corporation GLEI Inc. (Genetic Laboratories of Evolutionary Investment), she comments on the toxicity of our societal livelihood and the question of what occurs within the human body as a result. Ruiz hopes to provide an experience that questions the current state of the environmental and social climate through global and personal relationships to plastic. Her climate fiction based installation projects incorporate participatory and interactive elements that allow the audience to question their own role in the environmental downfall and what it means for the evolutionary future of humanity.

 

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Miles Brokenshire, Toronto

Miles Brokenshire is a visual artist currently living in Toronto. He specializes in large format photography and capturing the performing arts. His view on the inherent spontaneity of movement blends into the nature of our surroundings, whether man--‐made or natural. What is often left behind in nature ends up becoming the lone dancer in the wind, in a constant state of change. We live in the moment of our contemporary existence.

 

 

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Gloria Flores, Australia

I was raised in Anserma, Colombia, a small town with a population of 20,000. Life was simple, we were raised with little expectation in humble surroundings.

My back garden was our Supermarket, we had chickens, fresh eggs daily, carrots and other vegetables just a few meters from my back door. Here, every day I would help Grandmother make tortillas by hand, while listening her religious stories (we were all Catholics, of course).

She did much weaving of linen, tablecloths and beautifully detailed quilts. Now that she has passed on, I realize the significant influence she has had on my life. From a very early age, I felt connected to nature. Many of my holidays were spent on my own, walking in the tree line, collecting rocks and vegetation to contemplate their shapes, colors and textures.

Today as I create my artworks, I am taken back in time to my childhood and through this process I feel compelled to explore ancient techniques that will lead me into learning sustainable methods to develop fibers into hand-made papers, natural dyes and prints.

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Mika Aono, Eugene, OR

I have been an obsessive collector since I was a child; shiny acorns, smooth pebbles and dragon fly wings... Still today, every time I see a rusty nail on the ground, I put it in my pocket. I dream of what it was before and what it might become and re-membered them. To "remember" is to put back together, to make whole. I'm interested in giving broken, cast-aside things new life. I want to find meaning in the meaningless. This compulsion seems a pointless gesture, yet it is precisely this "odd" behavior that reveals who we are. I explore the humanness of absurdity and futility through laborious processes, finding value in failure.
Seems like slowly but surely, humans and nature are becoming things that exist at opposite ends. When? How? My idiosyncratic actions are a way for me to genuinely pay attention to my surroundings and cope with the sadness I experience.

I have made work that was inspired by fractal structures. I imagined the patterns being one of the keys to solving the mystery of inter-connectedness among all living things.  I cherish serendipity. In ever changing, shifting landscapes, I'm seeking a way to exist with nature in equilibrium.

 

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Christine Holtz, Pitttsburgh

Illegal dumping in Pittsburgh is widespread; however, it is a problem that many locals don’t even know about. The culture of dumping is boundless, affecting almost every neighborhood and socio-economic area in the city. We contacted Allegheny CleanWays, a local non-profit that organizes neighborhood clean-ups and fights illegal dumping, they granted us access to their statistical and GPS data, which was integral to developing this project.
We delved into the data, mapping known coordinates. Over 300 documented dumpsites, many exist on the sides of steep hills and in the woodsy perimeters of residential neighborhoods. More disturbing, many sites are in proximity to greenspaces used for outdoor recreation. This aspect of the data stood out so much, that we chose to document 50 of these specific locations, including public parks, little league fields, cemeteries and playgrounds.
The photographs appear to be landscapes of public spaces, but when coupled with data about the space as a dumpsite, the multiple layers of information present viewers with a new perception of these places. By creating a bridge between the unsuspecting landscape image and the truth about what happens there.

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Melissa Robertson, Ontario

A practicing artist and educator of almost 20 years, I have an unyielding passion for art and literature. I've had the privilege of pursuing rewarding careers within cultural centres, art galleries and libraries -- where advocacy for the arts is front and center. 

My work explores our conflicted relationships with the natural world and its resources. Detailed graphite drawings are overlaid with vibrant washes of ink, fine paper cutting and meticulous collage. I am exploring themes of natural land stewardship within the animal kingdom; reciprocity between species and environs; and the consequences of scarcity, abundance and human intervention within these ecosystems. The intention is to present powerful works which evoke a contemplation of our personal connections to our natural surroundings.

 

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Angela Dieffenbach, Chicago

Inspired by anatomy, strange experiments, healthcare trends, and medical innovations,
my work explores biology with an emphasis on medicine. Through study of anatomy’s history in the visual arts and sciences, I’ve become fascinated with the role that artists play in the perception and understanding of the human vessel. As a result of modern medical practices, our bodies are becoming increasingly transparent. This transparency not only adds to the perceived omnipotence of medicine, but to curiosities of bodily exploration.
Much of my research is tied to controversial experiments and an interest in post-natural
beings-- artificially constructed organisms. I’m interested in the ways in which animals and
humans are altered; I’m particularly drawn to chimeras. Additionally, I’m influenced by seemly outdated medical treatments (e.g. parasites) making a comeback in modern healthcare.
Using historic and contemporary symbols and methods, the work blurs past and present.
I reference premodern medical anatomies and juxtapose modern medical imaging. Referencing historical medical procedures and how they relate to modern treatment, the work draws attention to irony, absurdity, and the progress of technology. I use the vulnerability of the body and its contingent relationship to the medical industry and science as an instrument of inspection and reflection.

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Ellen Little, San Francisco

My work is inspired and guided by the natural things I find in my backyard and on my morning walks through urban wild spaces. I am fascinated by how the natural world adapts to the human world. By magnifying that which is small and temporary in nature - flowers, moths, dead birds and other ephemera become poignant reminders of the transience of life.

Throughout history flowers have represented fertility and birth while moths have been associated with death and decay. So I combine flowers and moths in my Backyard Series to suggest the interconnectedness and fragility of life where birth, aging and death are intertwined and nothing remains constant.

My Urban Bird paintings are inspired by an article in the New York Times about FLAP and the birds that crash into windows. I paint from real bird carcasses that I find or that friends bring me.

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ig   Michelle Stewart, Australia

Based in the Central Victorian Highlands, Australia, and closely surrounded by National Park, Michelle Stewart is deeply engaged in the bushland that inspires her practice. Working with glass since 2008, she is working towards a minimal impact with her practice through experimentation with material. Michelle uses recycled materials and particularly glass to explore the theme of the natural landscape and the premise of human impact within it. Through casting and pâte de verre techniques she explores delicate interrelations between species. Primarily working in the jewellery field she also presents installation, small sculpture and environmental art.

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Victoria Smith, MA

I find inspiration for my Kirigami designs from biological and ethnographic patterns and many designs combine the two.  As a scientist, educator and artist, I am grounded in process and interested in creating artwork based on a collective, immersive experience.  How do I tell visual stories that engage others and make them care about a place or life they have never been to or experienced?
In museums, objects and tangible experiences are used to engage and establish emotional connections with visitors to inspire, teach and entertain.  We protect what we care about.   My initial project idea is to create a visual story of life in different ecological niches and the human relationship between them using traditional paper cutting and Kirigami techniques.  I’ll document observations, biota, and patterns while in the field using illustration and photography, then use them to create a collection of paper cuttings.  Through pattern and style, the goal for each piece (or collection) will invoke a reaction that stimulates conversation.  Based on the experience, I realize my project may change, but that is also part of the creative process!

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Claire LaFontaine, Milwuakee

My current body of work consists of a series of monoprints, made using collected plant material, that are named after the GPS coordinates of where each plant was found. Plant specimens are collected on walks through natural areas intertwined with the urban landscape of Milwaukee, WI. I put these plant materials through a press, squishing them onto a sheet of Plexiglas which I have inked up with black oil based ink using a brayer. This destructive process transfers the impression of the plant into the ink while simultaneously destroying the plant and releasing its fluids. After removing most of the plant material, the impression in the ink that remains is run through the press again, this time transferring the image to paper. The result is a visual landscape in ink. My intent is to document my experiences of being in nature while also creating work that inspires further investigation and observation of these organic forms. There is an abstraction that occurs due to the process that creates depth in each piece in unsuspecting ways, which for me references the many layers of plant matter that exist in natural areas. This series of prints is about rediscovering one’s place within the ecosystem and recognizing the importance of green spaces in our everyday lives.

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Blake Evans, Zurich Ontario

From a young age I’ve always appreciated being on the land, foraging, climbing trees and walking along the shore of Lake Huron, inspired by the myriad of plant life special to each environment. This has influenced my strong desire to explore the natural world physically and spiritually shaping my artwork to be reflective of my concerns for the health of the land and water. Currently I am a Youth Committee member, and Media coordinator for the Neechee Studio collective in Thunder Bay which allows me to connect with a wide range of Indigenous and non-indigenous artists who also acknowledge the realm of flora and fauna.

Colour choice is important for me as I find communication can be exchanged through this universal element.

My current sculptural works using ceramics and crocheted plarn (plastic yarn) highlight species of marine birds as they connect to the colonial history of the exploitation of resources on this continent. I have also used paper molding to create multiples to speak about my concern of the logging industry’s effect on the woodlands.   My drawing tool is mainly chalk pastel, and my work portrays the spirit of corn and the evolving agricultural practices used to cultivate the plant for the human diet. Insect life on my drawings is represented with an element of watercolour painted collaged pieces. I focus a lot of energy on the balance and movement within the compositions of my work, which I borrow from my yoga practices. I am passionate to continue to learn from plants as they benefit human health and embody their teachings in my artwork.

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Amanda Besl, Buffalo NY

My most recent work depicts the paradox of preservation and suffocation. Remnants of botanical debris are visible through the translucent ‘skin’ of the plastic that contains them. These culled, severed bodies appear suspended in an ambiguous matrix, possessing a quasi-fetishistic nature while simultaneously suggesting some darker, possibly arbitrary form of curation. This hierarchy of selection – an essential activity in gardening – I liken to America’s current turbulent political climate, in which distinctions become lost in confusion and distortion. Nothing held in stasis can exist indefinitely without evolution or stagnation. The title of the series “I will try not to breathe” references an R.E.M. song. This group’s use of music as a platform for social change was influential while creating this body of work.

My process began with the extraction of my garden’s botanical flotsam and its placement into translucent plastic yard bags. I meticulously photographed these materials as subjects for my oil paintings. The resulting suggested movement straddles both hyperrealism and abstraction. I have also experimented with a highly glossed surface finish, which I intend as both a reference to the filmy substrate holding the actual clippings and as a further seduction. In my earlier painting and drawings, I explored the history of the plants I grew. I referenced the language of flowers and experienced equal amounts of excitement and aggravation while drawing these plants from life, which would move over the course of the drawing process. I interjected myself into these works by wrapping my subjects in the disembodied tangles of my hair from my hairbrush. This element contributes to the simultaneous experience of attraction and repulsion in my work.

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Hua Jin,
Montreal

I am interested in nature, in its constant changing quality, the circle of life and death.
I started to contemplate the idea of change, of the passing time and the evanescent quality
of existence, following the death of my parents.

And as a Chinese-Canadian artist, the influence of oriental aesthetic, religion and
philosophy inherently rooted in my way of thinking and my development as an artist.
My works are inspired by traditional Chinese literati ink paintings. Chinese artist
contemplate the philosophical ideas of existence through the subject of nature, the
landscape of mountains and water. My works aim to emphasize more the spiritual side of
the landscape rather then representing an actual scenery.

Through the lens of Buddhism and Zen philosophy, through the subject of nature, I use
photography, video, installation and drawing to contemplate a worldview that embraces
the concept of transience: of time, of life and of material things. I aim to gain insights into
life, death and of the nature of being through the study of nature, of its rhythm and its
inclusiveness.

 

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Valérie Chartrand, Winnipeg

I’ve always been fascinated by insects and by what their presence tells us about the world, both from a scientific and a metaphorical perspective. Insects through the ages have been perceived by various cultures as symbols and messengers. Today, the obsvervation of insects as bioindicators also speaks of the state of our ecology.

Primarily a printmaker, many of my prints use dried (found, never killed) insects in soft ground etchings to result in what resembles a fossil. The resulting image preserves the insect and is infused with its symbolism. Process and experimentation are at the core of my practice. I have been exploring encaustics, electroplating and insect prints of many forms including electroetching, cyanotype and photography.

As a first solo exhibition, I created Ghost Hives, a dystopian scenario through which to
contemplate causes and consequences of the disappearance of bees. I worked with bees from collapsed colonies to commemorate their past existence and reflect on their disappearance.

Through exploration, I seek to uncover what the presence and absence of insects today is telling us and how it impacts our environment and our lives.

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Laura Williams, Edinburgh

As a self-taught illustrator, the fascination for natural forms, detail and pattern have been at the forefront of my practice. Part of my process involves breaking down the complexities of Mother Nature’s designs - whether it be the structural precision of a pine cone or the gnarled depth found in a washed up piece of wood - then warping them into something both familiar and surreal. Maintaining a versatile and yet close relationship with our natural environment and learning about the makeup of our world is, in my opinion, fundamental to discovering who we are and why we are here.

One of the major influences in my work is studying the careful application and minute details found in botanical, entomological and geological illustrations. Toying with beauty and the unpleasant then injecting each subject with grace, poise and significance in the hope that others will marvel at their splendor like people did when they were first discovered.

My current collection of work, Insectarium, focuses on the fragility of insects native to the UK and the increasing pressures on their ecosystems. My aim is to highlight the diverse and complex lives of our invertebrates and the importance of their roles as well as their strained relationships with the human race. I hope to communicate the connection we share with all living things and our heavy reliance on them for survival. The need to preserve and cherish this chain of life is essential and seeking opportunities, such as this residency, would be an incredible chance for me to help further my research and improve my knowledge in this line of work.

 

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Samantha McCoy, Florida

My work is a grand scale examination of the micro universe of entomology. Florida’s torrid subtropical climate, kitschy tourist traps, and surreal chromatic skies have been a part of my life and influence the stage I set for my menagerie. My lifelong interest in the natural sciences has inspired each pair of mating insects, mollusks, and other animals. After thoughtful research and observation of these creatures, I create fantastic narratives using contemporary colors and strange scale relations. Making the subject larger than life takes us to an unseen part of our own world. By creating works of passionate promenading pests, I reveal the promiscuous activities of these somewhat anthropomorphized creatures.

Initially, pure rebelliousness drove my series. This lead to an introspective moment realizing how these hyper saturated bugs were a reflection on my own life. Growing up with a mildly conservative family and having a strong background in ballet and performing arts, my life was a stage where everything was proper and prim. I kept up the image I was brought up to have; polite and in no way belligerent. The cheeky subject put on display with a dramatic background, reflect this dichotomy within myself.

 

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Rachel Yurkovich, Cleveland

 In our modern world, there is a struggle to monitor appetites and avoid overindulgence. I am in constant observation of thoughtless choices, noticing that we often do not realize the weight of the impact we have on ourselves and our environment. In response to this, I frame instances of uninhibited consumption and the damaging consequences they often bring. This involves the use of insects and animals as stand-ins for human situations of desire, indulgence and self-destruction. Some may be based on pre-existing phenomenon; such as chickens enjoying the taste of their eggs or praying mantises eating each other after mating. I have been recreating these situations in order to witness them myself, to see how and when they actually happen and document them. Going forward I hope to capture happenings in a more documentary way without my interference, as I did in the film Black Grass. I will film living things in their natural environment, from invertebrates to humans, that are expressive of the issues previously mentioned.

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Sarah Sheesley, Michigan

I am moved by the composition of spider silk, the circulatory systems of
fish, salamander bio-regeneration and the tongues of giraffe. My writing
explores facts such as these through hybrid forms and lyric essay, with
reflection and associative logic. Each piece grows by exploring fragments
and filaments of the natural world, following these trails into unexpected
territory. My approach to these facts and observations is more playful than
scholarly, structured around associative logic and hypothetical digressions
that work to reconcile the internal world with the external. In disorienting
the reader just enough to skew our perception, flipping our relationship with
nature; a space opens for new clarity and a strange beauty.

Trained as both a painter and a writer, my creative practice engages both
visual and written text, inspired by a desire to truly see what’s in front
of me. Working in the tradition of a reflective essay, I am drawn to this
definition of reflection as “a color being reflected by one thing on another;
a coloration of an object, produced by the particular quality of light cast on
it…an iridescent highlight.” (OED) My goal is to un-hinge the boundary
between animal and human using facts and acrobatic reflection.

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Paula Pinero, Spain

I am a musician involved in a creative process focus on the idea of metamorphosis. I have always been fascinated by this feature in some species, particularly in the complex case of the butterfly, which after all its transformative efforts ends as an extremely beautiful creature for a brief time. I find it an inspiring metaphor for me as an artist in a gestation process, preparing myself to discover my true identity as multi instrumentalist composer and producer. At the same time, I am seeking to translate my sound concept and aesthetic into the visual field in order to complement my work.

Quoting Antoni Gaudi “nothing is art if it does not come from nature”. I come from a Macaronesian island where contact with nature elements is everywhere. Currently, I live in the noisy and overwhelming Manhattan, appreciating more than ever to interact with nature. At this point, to take a break to breath, observe and understand the life cycle of insects in their environment are fundamental for my artistic purposes.

 

 

 

 

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Meggan Joy Trobaugh, Seattle

Meggan Joy (Trobaugh) is an emerging exhibiting fine art photographer and digital collage artist, who is currently located in Seattle, Washington. For the last few years, her work has focused on digitally combined flora and fauna, as well as various found objects, in a modern interpretation of a 16th-century painting technique by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The finished work being a woven web of details, isolated on a black background - forcing the viewer to soak up the shape vs. the familiar elements that created it, or vice versa, depending on how close they look. The work reveals a subject that could never exist in the real world, made of thousands of her own photographs. Sometimes taking up to two years to complete, the finished works have been well received internationally, and Meggan was awarded an Honorable Mention by the International Photography Awards for her winning entry, "Warmth" which was completed in 2016.

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Agnes Marton, Luxembourg

In my highly visual, dreamlike poems I make invisible processes (changes of emotions, doubts and fears, inner fights) recognizable, while recreating the language playfully (using non-existent words, distortions, unusual punctuation and layout, mixtures of different languages, juxtaposition). I talk about mysterious beings, snakes proud of their new skin, leopards lying in the middle of the canopy dreaming about their new territories… The word-sparing compositions are full of music, and they leave enough room for the imagination. They are never predictable, they keep surprising you in a thought-provoking way.

I often travel and take part in artist residencies to be able to get to know the tiniest details of different landscapes, flora and fauna, local businesses (tools and methods of craftsmen), the local people’s problems, their way of thinking and speaking. It serves as the starting point to my writing (and then it gives its colours too).

My first collection ’Captain Fly’s Bucket List’ (just like the libretto I wrote based on it) revolves around fulfilling desires and handling regrets; facing life in the light of death. I am interested in each and every aspect of death. I am ready to learn and share my knowledge and ideas.

 

yjtd   Shinyoung Park, UK

My artistic practice focuses on distilling essence by visualizing invisible parts of life at ambivalent conceptual or psychological borders. I’ve been interested in mortality, religious belief and travel. Recently, I am focusing on the scenes in travel by confronting unfamiliar surroundings with imagination. Although my work is not closely related to wildlife, the experience from Nocturne residency will be a good stimulus for my inspiration to develop the field of artwork. If I am accepted to participate in the residency, I plan to create a series of drawing, painting and prints about wildlife in magical mood.

Basically, my work starts from drawing. For me, drawing is a method to record the cycle of life and death. When a moment of reality is captured in the frame of an image, the moment is dead, falling into eternal standstill. An intriguing point is that the aura of death and aliveness coexist in an image. The state of an image is ambiguous, neither totally dead nor totally alive. So, the act of drawing is the in-between act of life and death and the creation of an image is the process of freezing and reviving a certain moment in the frame of mortality. The thing I do is to treat the dead moments as an undertaker and to gather them as a collector. The life cycle is also applied to the use of materials. I’ve enjoyed various edible materials like coffee, wine, seasoning and so on. It’s inspiring for me that these materials are made by a living thing’s death and the death is revived on the scene.
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Deborah Santoro, MA

My prints and multi-media pieces inhabit the space between yearning and falling, between striving to realize a potential, and the habits/patterns/programs that enmesh us in ways of being that do not serve our higher selves.  The LIQUORS sign becomes a stand-in for addictions of all kinds, and the hopelessness that trails them. The asana, or yoga poses, represent an embodied, intuitive knowing that links human potential with universal themes; dendrites and star charts, our mitochondria like tiny suns inside our bodies.  In the time bound dance between despair and enlightenment, time, pattern and color all have their part to play.

Moving forward, my process is entering a research phase as I complete the Asana series and think more deeply about neurons, dendrites, and tree roots.  The connections between things interest me greatly - the linkage between neurons and start charts, what happens as information travels along synapses, how does this relate to the mycorrhizae that bond symbiotically with tree roots in ways that enhance the survival of both organisms?  I’m interested in creating prints and site specific installations that explore these ideas and hint at what they might mean to humanity, inferring the idea that a larger view of the universe might give us perspective on our frail notions species-hood and our anthropocentric world.

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Blawnin Clancy, Ireland

To Sleep: Sleep is the portal to the unconscious- the part of the mind that that we are not generally aware of but holds wisps of memories, feelings and ideas. A thought, a snippet of overheard conversation, a fleeting glimpse witnessed during the waking hours can spark a virtual mirage of veracity and tangibility that manifests as a dream.

These photographs are a staging, a dramatic recreation of the murky shadowy concealed inner world of dreams. The recurring dreams of travelling, losing teeth, finding treasures and juxtaposed people and objects are subjects recreated in a representational mode.

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Luba Diduch, Alberta

My research is based in collaborative and participatory projects that explore the ways in which forests can be used as creatively productive spaces. My current project titled Sounds of the Biome is composed of field recordings captured in forested environments in Alberta. My purpose in making these recordings is to transform them within audio compositions, and to raise awareness regarding Canadian forests’ beauty and vulnerability. I am interested in enacting creative practices – such as audio recording the natural environments around trees – and linking them to other forested regions in Canada.

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Linda Duvall, Saskatoon

I am a Saskatoon-based artist whose work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. My hybrid practice addresses recurring themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence.

In the summer of 2017 I completed a project in which I spent 65 days in a 6-foot deep hole in rural Saskatchewan with 45 different individuals from various parts of the world. Each person spent 6 hours a day in the hole with me, considering the hole within various frameworks including scientific, geologic, biological, historical, or others. We read out loud, hummed to the walls, talked, observed the birds, shared stories, were silent and often all of the above. Many of these activities involved intense listening – to the subtle sounds of baby bank swallows in their nests, the falling grains of sand, the wind under various conditions. We had only lapel mics that we used in various ways to either isolate sounds or create mini-symphonies of the merging of sand and wind etc.

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Terry Billings, Saskatoon

In my audio, video and installation work, I raise questions that challenge us to consider the perspectives of a different kind of body, of different modes of vision, and how variant means of moving though space and time might affect non-human consciousness, experience and perception. This work anticipates a deepening engagement with the biological other from which we are so dangerously estranged.

Gathering imagery, sound and materials during walks in my environment informs my overall approach. I am interested in how a present, subjective experience of a place and its creatures and plants on an intimate scale is influenced by and contradicts the more dominant modern values of consumption and development; how caring for a place and its inhabitants changes its perception and inherent value.

Working more poetically than discursively, I investigate different visual and narrative structures as a way of proposing embodied knowledge, alternate umwelten or sensoria - how beings perceive and interpret their environment - and the inherent possibilities for other-creaturely consciousness within these. Because translation through technology is an important aspect of these proposals, scientific method becomes a part of the poetic of the work, subsumed into a more ambivalent rigor.


i   Scottie Irving of The Peptides, Ottawa

Fundamentally, I am a community builder. Growing up on my great-grandfather’s farm and steeped in the culture of close-knit rural Eastern Ontario, I gained an appreciation for two rudimentary social customs: the chinwag and the get-together. Knowing what constitutes an effective chinwag (chat, discussion, conversation, dialogue, debate) and a successful get-together (blind date, party, concert, meeting, rehearsal) has been central to every endeavour I have ever undertaken, large or small.

My day-to-day mission is simple: to advance, in the chinwag department, from “small talk” to “big talk” as quickly as possible—thereby laying the groundwork for stimulating get-togethers and, over time, a robust culture and community.

I have observed that both music and food represent uniquely potent catalysts for creating a sense of togetherness among people. My work as a keyboard specialist (piano, organ, synthesizer, accordion) provides me an ever-fascinating means by which to accomplish my aim of cultivating togetherness—often without words. The same can be said for sharing in the making and eating of food. My background and lifelong interest in agriculture, which I view as an extension of ecology, reflects this impulse. I am an amateur seed saver, an aspiring local grower, and a passionate breakfast host.

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Coco Collins of Construction & Destruction
Nova Scotia

As Construction & Destruction, we strive through our work to plumb personal narratives, celestial noise, sentience, flora and fauna, the animal other, external politics, internal geographies, f-bombs, weather bombs, immediacy and temporality, edicts and edifices, thresholds, tongues, lizard brains, loves, gestures, marginalia, negative and no- space…
We have each made long-running informal studies of animals and the science of sound, and continue to do so from our rural vantage.  We are interested both in the pragmatics and the philosophies inherent to rhythm-based communication and sound.  Sympathetic resonance, as actuality and metaphor, is something we pursue in all of our endeavors.  Including work we’ve done with music and people who have autism, music and survivors of abuse, music and the elderly, and music and teens in schools.

We’re very interested in an opportunity to further our studies of sound and communication and to commune with other like-minded individuals.  We’re intrigued by both new and ancient approaches to sound and the biosphere and are open to learning and watching and gathering information and experiences.  We relish any opportunity to chat gear, eco-phenomenology, feedback, animals, and to work towards the creation of another album.

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Cimarron Knight, Vancouver

 

I am a conceptual artist currently working within the mediums of installation, assemblage and the written word. Within my artistic practice, I have been questioning memory and how it influences narrative: personal and societal. How are these stories influenced by our intellectual reasoning, our body memory and our cultural conditioning? How do these perceived truths inform who we are and what we contribute as individuals and a society?

As a contemporary western female, I have been looking not only at my own cultural and gender mythologies, but beginning to explore other perspectives including nature. What I have been discovering is these collective and individual narratives greatly influence our environments: through our politics, our relationships to ourselves and each other, our planet, and how we present ourselves in a cyber-world. As an artist and writer, I have been asking myself how can messages be sent and received in a complex world of oversaturation?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dorie Petrochko, Connecticut

What intrigued me to become a bird artist?  Primarily- a passion for birds, and an intense focus on all things avian, including research, birding, travel and conservation. My focus for the past 25 years has been to capture birds in every imaginable pose and habitat using field sketching and photography in the initial stages of preparation, then proceeding to develop my compositions in mixed media (watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil) to complete my paintings. More recently, I have been using experimental backgrounds for my subjects to create more tension between the subject and its environs.

I prefer using mixed water media for quick applications of intense pigment, which serve as backgrounds for my bird renderings. The whole process is very labor intensive, juggling foreground and background, letting the dynamics of color, and the bird’s position, dictate the direction of the painting. I pay specific attention to bird anatomy and the character of birds in my work.

Bird paintings are ever evolving. The added challenge is that there is something intrinsically spiritual and secretive about birds, that is often untouchable. That is what keeps me going.

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Gesyk Isaac, Fredericton

I am 28-year-old Mi'gmaq woman residing in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Last year I received a certificate from the Aboriginal Visual Arts (AVA) program from the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. My practice centers around my culture and the use of natural materials. I work primarily with black ash, tanning animal skins, beading and some quill work. My interest lies in combining what we see as “Traditional” Indigenous art and fusing it with unexpected mediums such as clay and metal. The idea of place is very influential to my work. I am constantly drawing inspiration from my surroundings and an opportunity like this would benefit me greatly.

Ornithology, botany, and ecology are topics that I am constantly educating myself about. I have studied traditional plant medicine in the past. Having the opportunity to see so many bird species return home is very exciting!

uyf   Kate Gorman, Ohio

I am a narrative textile artist interested in line, both physical and metaphorical. Physically I enjoy the act of mark-making, the movement, texture and complexity of drawing with dyes and pens, needle and thread.  As a storyteller, I make linear connections, past to present, with storyline, timeline, paths of migration, map lines, family lineage, etc. History and memory are ephemeral and open to interpretation, but integral to who we are, where we are and how we have become in this place at this time. 

            Birds are an important element of my work. Physically they represent motion and freedom. Metaphorically they represent movement to the unknown, whether simple migration, or on a higher, spiritual plane. They are also gloriously wonderful creatures to draw, both at rest and in motion. I love the way a bird's shape texture and movement are so suited to their metaphorical interpretations. Parakeets, pigeons, blackbirds and crows are featured in my art quilts of the past decade.

            I work in textiles both to honor traditional women’s work and because of the tactile experience of handling cloth. It is slow work, and meditative, both anecdote and antidote to my otherwise fast-paced life. 

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Karolina Latvyte, Lithuania

I am an artist who likes to explore. I am a traveller. Not only by bus, plane or feet but by my mind itself. I gain the inspiration from nature and wilderness.
If I am not travelling outside the homeland, I am exploring places with my memories, my studio is a temple and the creative process is a mediation which helps me to stay in the present moment. Through the images of landscapes and the wildlife, I am answering the questions which trigger me about the life and human being. The concept I choose to work on, it always comes from my philosophical point of view, I speak about death, time as an illusion and vanishing memories on my canvases. I seek that my artworks, which are full emptiness and loneliness, would help me to get the better connection with a viewer and would speak my words. Lonely objects, empty landscapes and the unfinished canvas guide me all my artistic life. My main technique to create is painting, but I find myself that working with other media as photography and video, helps me to reveal my ideas.
My artistic goal is to inspire people to see the beauty of the world through my aesthetic experience and help them to get the better connection with nature.

kutf  

Tanya Chaly, NYC

In my work I have been pursuing a number of projects with Natural History
Museums/ Research Institutions as well as Scientists working in the field over the
last five years. My most recent work involved a project looking at ecosystem
regeneration and resilience in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.
I am interested in connecting with scientists and incorporating elements of research
and data into my drawings as I see the two disciplines of art and science as
connected and not separate unrelated fields. They are both ways in which to
understand and analyze the world but through different lenses.
I see drawing as an immediate way in which to recapture a crystalized form of a
vision of nature not always recognized, presenting to the viewer a clinical, or
forensic representation of biodiversity.

khg  

 

Kate Houlne, Indiana

Invisible Threads

Avian life has stood the test of time. A set of creatures evolved from the time of the dinosaurs. Yet, birds are in a cataclysmic decline around the world. Deforestation, chemical use, a changing climate and human made structures all take a toll on the bird population. These winged creatures do so much for the environment, from insect control, replanting of forests and pollination of plant life to providing recreation and spiritual guidance. They are not a menace to humans, yet how we live definitely is a menace to them. 

The separation of man from nature began long ago and the split continues today. This work aims to visualize the invisible threads that connect how humans affect the land and consequently the birds, whose loss, as an indicator species, is not only a loss of bird song, but the loss of human life as well.

 

2017

 

 

 

 

infinitesimal

christina  

Christina La Sala, San Francisco

I am a scavenger, a collector, a researcher and a fabricator. My work is site based, performative and driven by a love of process, history and craft. I read the world as pattern and experience it as time code, reading and misreading pattern and symbol as sensory narratives and fragmented symbols.
My projects explore a relationship to time through material choice, process and kinetics:
ephemeral materials like water and wax, processes like spinning and embroidery, kinetics that employ rocking, melting and spinning, are sensory based, sequenced investigations of temporal patterns that lie hidden in our daily activities.
I have been observing the flight patterns of birds and insects as part of my ongoing investigation of pattern in natural and human systems. I am especially interested in moths; diagramming their movements through drawing, photography and journalling. The Nocturne Residency would significantly contribute to my understanding of the behavior of moths and lay the foundation for a project that interprets the temporal and physical movements of moths in flight. The art work will develop over several years as a series of textiles and sculptures.

kay  

Kay Hartung, USA

My work is related to my fascination with the microscopic world. I have been looking at electron microscope photographs and am inspired by the abstract organic shapes and intense color of this hidden world. I imagine the energy and interactions that go on in the body and the mind to produce action and thought. I am exploring the connections between science and art ; conscious of the profound effects that these minute biological forms have on the universe.
The imagery, loosely based on observation of biological structures, explores the interconnections of these cellular forms. The process builds layer upon layer suggesting growth, development and movement. Some of the pieces are in more of a static or restful stage whereas others explode with activity. The order and chaos of these biological processes are captured in my imagery.

Amica
  Amica Dickson, UK

Using my own reality as a starting point I make work that aims to act as a vehicle for reverie, provoking questions on issues born through my experiences but not singularly specific to me. Primarily I am concerned with illness, it's physicality and it's emotional impact. I aim to confront ones innate response to certain subject matter, using visuals so expected connotations are subverted. Play between the objective and the personal is prevalent. Presenting the first contradiction in a line of many that are central to my practice.
The morbid and the poetic. Beauty and abjectness. Attraction and repulsion. 
Exploring imagery we cannot usually see, revealing what to the human eye is ugly/abject but under the microscope is beautiful. Making the internal, external. In doing so bringing something that is usually out of sight, into view. Balancing which personal elements to reveal and which to conceal so my work can remain both ambiguous and specific, scientific and dactylic.

Tosca   Tosca Terán, Toronto

My work explores Terrestrial manifestations through combining tactile, sculptural forms, and audio; creating immersive environments, unNatural History Dioramas, and performative, wearable structures questioning Human origin and mythos.

My ‘jewelry’ serves as maquettes and experiments towards my sculptural work. The majority of my work draws from my fascination with the artistic representation of natural history, the creation of fictitious places in literature and my interest in Cordyceps fungus – in particular; Cordyceps unilateralis, a species of entomopathogenic fungus that infects and alters the behaviour of ants in order to ensure the widespread distribution of its spores.
The body of work, An unNatural History created for Urban Glass Brooklyn and featured during SOFA, NY 2009 is an example of this passion to bring the microcosmos to the macro through metal, glass, mixed/multi-media, often 'wearable' maquettes.

If we can say that the world of science is synonymous with truth and the world of art with that of fiction, I want to tread a middle ground that is unusual and seemingly beyond belief, yet also familiar.

    biophilia

poison

 

 

Expedition leader
Alyssa Ellis,
Canada
The Laboratory of Toxic Materials

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

 

michelle
 

Michelle Bunton, Canada

Rooted in a space of paradox, my practice attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video or sound record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body/psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations, my work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another in a perseverance towards preservation. My practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” which is defined as an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. I consider technology-based archives to occupy this intermediate reality, offering a critical venue through which to examine larger themes, such as gender, sexuality, death and decay.

rachel  

Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Syracuse NY

There is this extraterrestrial thing that occurs between a visual experience and its cognitive translation. The experience of looking has a visceral relationship with the psyche. The sight of a worm dying in the sun can contain a sort of joyful aesthetic satisfaction, along with the everyday mundanity of such an occurrence, all the way down the spectrum to the very tragedy of the mortality of living beings.
The images that I have shown are from a group I’m working on called The Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones. This project integrates disparate imagery, from highly stylized documents, photographs, videos of dissections, and sourced diagrams from scientific educational materials. The work deals with the relationship that sight and imagination has with knowing, specifically in aspects of science that are heavily associated with an objective and visually clinical idea of knowledge. I am complicating that with a more poetic conception of scientific phenomena.
With a history of attempts to grasp a conception of Being that encompasses the vast network of biological life and death, from Aristotle’s attempts to address the different kinds of souls possessed by living things in De Anima (On the Soul) in 350 BCE, to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein or fundamental presence in his major 20th century treatise Being and Time, there is still an abundance of wonder within the knowns and unknowns of the network of interactions in the world that my work addresses.

jordan   Jordan Hall, Vancouver

As a playwright, I'm invested in eco-theatre—in understanding our relationship with our environment and the ways in which it resonates with the unspoken truths of human existence. I've written on climate change and apocalyptic ideation, and I am currently exploring biodiversity/the Holocene extinction. As I've been grappling with what it means for a species to be implicated in a mass extinction, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to represent the complicated web of relationships that tie us to the natural world, what it means to attempt to dramatize the inhuman, and how the idea of extinction confronts us both with our mortality, and with questions of our viability as a species. I'm excited about the opportunity Biophilia presents in terms of discussing these issues with like-minded artists, and to think about how strategies from other artistic traditions might be useful in trying to illuminate our relationship with the natural world on the stage.

loygv  

Melissa Smith, NC

I love nature. I make art because I love nature. I became interested in scientific illustration because I knew that pursuing a future in that field would mean that I would always have a reason to be close to nature. Spending time noticing details about things in the natural world just changes a person – it is a very intimate thing. 

Knowledge about the natural world is what inspires my work. Learning something new literally every day is what keeps me going. Science is always changing. Nature is always changing. There is no room to get bored and inspiration is very literally everywhere.

The art I create is, of course, somewhat technical, but I feel my own interpretation of nature is evident in each piece.

ytf  

Rhonda Vanover, NY

Just as a photogram captures the shadow of an object once present and now removed, my photographic images attempt to grasp at the mortal tensions between contact and loss, apparition and aberration, object and specter. My photographic and darkroom processes slow time to lay bare single moments for unsentimental scrutiny, tracing the iridescent shimmer of an abandoned nest or the gristle of an old bone.


The foundation of my art practice is a biographical documentary about death and dying. To seek and photograph the essence of what is left behind, oscillating between the real and the memorial.

 

brooke  

Brooke Sauer, L.A.

Regardless of what medium I employ, my work has a whimsical tone that explores my love of nature and adventure. In the past year I have been creating a large collection of hand cut collages entitled, In Search of Treasure. In this ongoing series I explore the human relationship to landscape using mineral specimens as terrain to be contemplated, explored, enjoyed, and to inspire feelings of awe. I have often fantasized about shrinking down and adventuring over the surfaces of a really great rock I have found, and I wanted to express this fantasy through these surrealist moments that encourage the viewer to derive their own narrative, and place themselves in the tiny landscape that they see before them. 

   

submerge

betty
 

Betty Kirschenman, Alberta

I am the granddaughter of homesteaders on the prairies, living in the community they worked to establish over a century ago and appreciation of this land is an integral part of my art. Golds and earth tones, the colours of the prairies, are often overwhelmed by the blue drama of the enormous sky.  Transparency of watercolour is especially well suited for capturing the clarity of light, whether on land, sky or water.

Southeastern Alberta is in the Palliser Triangle, the driest part of Canadian prairies, originally labeled “uninhabitable” due to the arid conditions. With the exception of the South Saskatchewan River, the only water in our area consists of spring runoff, dugouts, wells and mostly alkali sloughs.  In the midst of fields and sandhills, the unexpected ruggedness of river breaks and coulees comes as a complete surprise. For some reason, “the river”, is almost always lurking in my art.  When I travel, I want to be near, on and in water, as well as paint it.   Why does water have such an allure for a prairie girl?  Absence?  Unpredictability?  Unfamiliarity?   Potential?  Reflections?  Power?  Colour?  Danger?  I would love to explore those questions! 

edwina  

Edwina Cooper, Australia

As a sailor, a boat is the mediator for my oceanic experience. My practice is sustained by an interest in the relationship and interactions of human and oceanic space. The motivator of this investigation remains my sailing practice, as a method for experiencing the ocean. The threshold of air and water presents itself to us as oceanic surface, and it is my intention to consider how we engage with and quantify this otherwise foreign space. 
The focus of my practice has encapsulated our sustained attempts at fathoming oceanic space through measure and control, contributing to my understanding of oceanic phenomena. Through my practice as a sailor, I have identified the boat to be the mediator of my oceanic experience. The act of sailing, as well as its materiality, informs an intimate and embodied understanding of oceanic space. The work produced through this process is ‘rigged’, as a human response of control through relevant systems (such as forecasting and mapping), as comparable generalised quantitative documents of the uncontrollable.

My practice has been informed by this very physical and unique experience of the ocean; I attempt to extend, control and test this relationship through a lineage of kinetic sculptural/ installation works.
iyg   Pam Cardwell, NYC

I begin my work by drawing the shapes and markings from objects directly in nature.   I then take initial drawings back into studio, working from memory, imagination, photos and notes I have taken onsite until the drawings feel right.  Growing up in West Virginia, USA I spent time as a child fascinated by mountains, streams, creeks and rivers.  Canoeing, kayaking and white water rafting, the culture of landscape is a part of my being.  As an adult I get my water “fix” by swimming.  Recently I have been attempting to open water in the ocean at Brighton Beach.  The movement, color, light and fluidity, ephemerality of water fascinate me.  Capturing color, and movement through paint and light is my job as a painter.  Understanding nature and living outdoors affects my working process and helps me channel something outside of myself.  The body of work contained in the attached images were inspired by my time at an artist residency in New Orleans.  While at this residency I took kayaking trips to learn about the waterways of New Orleans and drew from the vast array of tropical plant life.  A past research project on color was done through a Fulbright Scholar grant in the Republic of Georgia.  I used rocks and plants from the landscape in the Republic of Georgia to make pigment.   Meeting other artists, scientists, writers and poets at artist residencies is also crucial to my development as an artist as it feeds and expands my working process.

Botany for artists
GERMINATE
July 2017
  germinate
hg  

Laura Lewis, Austin TX

My illustration work aims to capture a glimpse into other worlds primarily using plants and color to guide a piece’s specific mood. I believe plants can be directly correlated with emotion and I explore that in each of my works. Research and scientific accuracy are the foundations with which I like to build environments from, mostly from observing the nature we have here on this Earth. I find it endlessly fascinating, and I am reaching a chapter of my life where I aim to learn as much as I can about botany so I can better understand the subjects I draw and the worlds I am creating. One of the most vital underlying messages in all my work remain rooted in environmental preservation.

sonja
 

Sonja Hébert, Vancouver

The cycle of life, death and rebirth as impermanence plays a primary role in my work both thematically as well as in my approach to my practice of drawing and installation. It has led to my questioning the conundrums related to how and why I make things in a consumer society. 
I am convinced that a healthier relationship to the plant communities will lead to a better relationship with each other and all life.  This philosophy has become pivotal in my life as I build a language in my art practice centered on human connection to land and more specifically to plants. It has become an undercurrent on which I build my themes.
For several years, I have been striving to build a deeper relationship to the plants in my immediate surroundings through wild foraging and through my installation works using roots and grasses. Plants have provided humans with food, medicine, shelter, and building materials for boats, wagons and chariots. Through my research, I’ve come to understand plants as the basis of civilizations through massive agriculture of cereal crops like rye, wheat and corn.  
Gathering this understanding through science is a main springboard of inspiration for both my drawings as well as my installations. I strive to render poetically what I learn through science. I see art as having the capacity to safeguard against the over fragmentation of knowledge often experienced through the scientific lens by highlighting the interdependence of all life. 

cynthia  
Cynthia Farnell
, Georgia

I am a visual artist working in lens-based media, primarily photography. The central themes of my work are place and cultural identity in contemporary life. Engagement with place through my studio work allows me to forge meaningful connections to my community.

Narrative, transience and transformation are inherent in the medium and processes of photography and over time they have manifested in my work as recurring themes. My formal strategies can change from project to project. Sometimes I employ documentary methodologies and use representational techniques. In other instances I use ambiguous, altered and layered imagery to evoke metaphysical realms.

The recent body of work that I have attached as part of the application for the Biophilia : Germinate residency is Garlands, a suite of large-scale prints and an HD video piece. These baroque elaborations connect with deeper and enduring aspects of human experience through beauty and continuity. In this series of pigment inkjet prints on Belgian linen, blooming plants are metaphors for cycles of death and regeneration as well as poignant remnants of human presence. Many of the flowers I use as source material are bulb-forming lilies acquired as pass-along plants. Their cultivation provides me with a sense of place and connection with the past.

amber
 

Amber Bond, Toronto

Many of my visual artworks concentrate on the human body. They examine its physical and figurative processes. Illustrating the body as having been anatomized enables me to dissect how it is that these parts are treated allegorically. For instance, although the human heart is simply an organ intended to circulate blood through the body, it is often romanticized as a vessel for everything kept secret or held dear. I attempt to examine this metaphor with clear-cut visuals of electric hearts and tactile representations of open heart surgery, using hand-sewn felt, wire and plastic. 

Recently, my artistic processes have involved a rediscovery of my roots as a Métis individual. This has consisted of many endeavours: learning and making use of traditional crafts, such as beadwork; creating acrylic paintings to communicate aspects of my personal journey; and the formation of my sustainable business, Treecycle Toronto, which operates on an indigenous philosophy of conservation, turning previously-loved Christmas trees and fallen branches into housewares, artwork, jewelry, and cosmetics. As such, the prospect of engaging further with nature as a means to enhance my artistic practice intrigues me greatly.

usdg
 

Guylaine Couture, Montreal

The artist juggles subjects that question us: cancer, ecology, mourning and landscape. These themes ask for introspection. She delicately drafts the message, analyzes the meaning of words and images as well as developing the final form of the book with accuracy. The process requires time, reflection and several models in order for the desired result to be achieved.

Using old books, collage, drawing and manual printing, she tries to give a new direction,  a second life to all kinds of material. Each book attempts to create a fusion between the contents and the container while questioning the manipulation of the object by the reader.
To create a book allows for an exchange with the reader both by the text and by the manipulation of it. Slowly browsing one of her artists’ books is an experience, a conversation,  a relationship with her and her concerns.

tracie
 

Tracie Mae Stewart, BC

My work as an Arborist, project designer, IPM, and food grower informs my art making practice. Questions arise daily over food security, pollinator collapse, climate/ Ocean change and the connectivity of all, fueling my efforts to raise social awareness. My role of guardian, caretaker and educator, as well as artist; experiencing the fullness of being immersed in the environment leads me to create multi sensory socially engaged installations. These diverse art practices enable me to engage various publics and communities educate and invite engagement. These questions fuel my art practice. Answers arise through art.

 

     
    nocturn

m

 

Mellissa Fisher, UK

Mellissa Fisher’s practice combines art with microbiology; her interests lie in the interrelationships between illustration, sculpture and living organisms. Mellissa’s research is heavily based on the connections with nature and the self, posing questions to an audience regarding their relationship with their bodies as well as their link to nature.

Mellissa’s practice has developed through creating bacterial sculptures of her own body, into an exploration of mycology by growing mushrooms on sculptures of the human form, to represent the idea that our bodies are an ecosystem, using the body as a landscape for growing and hosting different organisms.

rotutnick   Robyn Crouch, Montreal

The imagery and symbols that come through Robyn's work encourage one's gaze inward to the cellular realms. There, one discovers playful depictions of chemical processes; they are the basis for the macrocosm, and our human consciousness becomes an interface between the seen and the unseen worlds.

In her functional ceramic work, the influence of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony encourages moments of contemplation. The viewer-participant can loose her or his train of thought while meandering through considerately composed collages of geometries, molecules, plants, and creatures, all woven together by strands of double-helical DNA. A flash of recognition. A momentary mirror.

A goal in this work is balance and harmony between the form, and the micro-mythologies encircling it. Moments of personal ritual in daily life beget even deeper, more conscious presence. Little by little over time we gain insight into what makes us tick.
Robyn’s goal is to provide a platform (however small), on which to rest, and off of which to launch forays into the luscious and potent realms of imagination, self-inquiry, and discovery during moments of solitude and engaged contemplation. So let us celebrate alone and together!

Shavon  

Siobhan Madden, Ontario www.greenheartartistry.com

I have come to realize that my role in this world is not a passive one. I use my artistic practice as a tool to provoke thought and emotional response, through the act of making. The nature of my practice is interdisciplinary, focusing on sculpture and instillation. I am not limited to one specific medium to address a specific material response. I use the rawness of material form, in this instance algae, to capture the viewer aesthetically through its color and physical form to layer the petri like dishes. Through this labour-intensive process, I build upon my relationship with the natural world. In my opinion, the act of making is the most powerful tool I have as an artist. I feel that for my own work to be valid, it needs to have a purpose and it needs to give a voice to the natural world, which affects us all. My practice is driven by my personal relationships and studies in environmental science. This is my foundation when understanding the natural world and what my role is an artist.

 

tracy
 

Tracy Maurice, Brooklyn

Tracy Maurice is an artist, photographer and filmmaker based in NY. Her practice is a research based, project to project approach that combines analog techniques, often inspired by science, nature, and early cinema special effects. She is interested in exploring symbolism via techniques that use ”artificial darkness" (a term coined by Noam M. Alcott ), often using a black ground or dark field microscopy to create iconic images that aim to redefine 'darkness' as something transcendent and connected to nature. 

She recently debuted an audiovisual project titled,’ Preservation’, at Lincoln Center Atrium in NY. Her experimental film investigated themes of change, transformation, and reoccurring patterns found in nature through a series of impressionistic vignettes using dance and microscopy and set to a score composed by Thomas Alton Crane, and performed live with Eliot Krimsky and Colin Killalea. She worked as the Creative Director for the band Arcade Fire from 2004 - 2008, creating artwork, music videos and live content for the albums ‘Funeral’ and ‘Neon Bible’. Her background in music has led her to continue to collaborate with musicians, including Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld, among others. Tracy's work has been featured in festivals and publications including, The Worldwide Short Film Festival, Creativity, Shots, Stash Magazine, Billboard and Print Magazine. She won a Juno Award in 2008 for Best Director of the Year for the artwork and design of the full-length album, Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. 

rosemary
 

Rosemary Lee, Copenhagen

My artistic practice is based on investigation of interactions between technologies and systems in the natural world. Each of my installations manifests complex webs of influence linking machines, living things and the environments which they inhabit. Working from research into themes such as media geology, hybrid ecology and posthumanism, my artwork brings together equally hybrid influences from philosophy of media, science, conceptual art and literature. I make an effort to use my artwork as a platform for understanding and responsibility toward the ecological effects of human intervention and technological development.

     

Insects and entomology for artists
SWARM
June 2017

 

 

 

swarm

iyt   Expedition Leader:
Shannon Amidon
, San Jose, CA

My artwork explores the cycles of life, calling attention to its transitory and fragile nature. I’m enthralled and intrigued by the natural sciences, and I feel that especially in this technology-driven age we need reminders of the briefness of life and wonders of the natural world.

Drawn to the alchemical nature of the process, I use the ancient medium of encaustic (molten beeswax) and often incorporate organic, upcycled and cast off materials to create my mixed media pieces. I love using materials that have a nostalgic, pensive, or mysterious feeling. I have a strong emotional connection to well-worn objects that have been through many hands. Sometimes I feel the essence of their history reflected in my art. My subject matter includes a variety of natural history elements including insects, botanicals, seed pods, and birds as well as ancient symbolism and geometry.

By interlacing science, art and nostalgia I strive to create pensive and familiar images that transport the viewer to another time and place, evocative of a moment filled with exploration, wonder and discovery.
michael
 

Michael Pisano, Pittsburgh

Michael Pisano is an animator, illustrator, and filmmaker. His first career aspiration was to be a dinosaur. Later acquisition of bifocals in suburban New Jersey led to an amateur interest in small things: ants, pondscum particles, fine print, and the Earth as featured in illustrations of the solar system.

Michael uses storytelling, from documentary to illustration series to transmedia hybrids, to educate about nature and the importance of stewardship in the Anthropocene. His nonfiction work highlights the intricacy and intertwined beauty of all living things, and the researchers and activists working to understand and protect them. His fiction work uses the treatment of nature in myth and fantasy as a point of entry into environmental justice conversations.

Since reading E.O. Wilson’s ​Naturalist​ at age 11, ants remain his favorite animal. He admires the qualities they represent: collaboration, selflessness, curiosity. Ants also remind Michael of relative scale, that humans are cells on a gently revolving giant. The giant clambers a circle around an infinite cosmos. That cosmos repeats infinitely. Simultaneously, we are each a subatomic cosmos, infinite electrons arrayed into monkey shapes wearing infinite plant fiber atoms using a variety of small boxes inside of bigger boxes, all experienced inside a fractalized matroyshka series of perceived cultural boxes. Thanks, ants.

cynthia  

Cynthia O’Brien, Ontario

I have two bodies of work at the moment, that are opposite yet connected.  
One body is based on the collection of plants, from down under, a “physical memory” of flowers, seed pods and leaves found in the Flecker Botanical Gardens in Cairns, Australia. I spent a month long residency at the Tanks Arts Centre (2012), with the concept of being guided by nature to see a plant from all angles, light and moods. My hands became competent in perfecting the plants, to emphasis both their strength and delicacy. With my return to Canada I have been able to recreate these flowers based on my physical (touch) memory. 

It has been this practise that lead to my interest in the physical and chemical connections of memories contained within the body and brain.  My darker, heavier body of work discusses the actual physical make up of the brain, folding back and forth onto itself to create the fast connections needed for memory.  Yet these pieces talk of emptiness, darkness and loss.
I am searching for a way to bring these bodies together to witness, create and remember beauty in as many ways as possible. 

Liam
 

Liam Blackwell, Montreal

My work focuses primarily on assisting the individual to transcend their body's sensory limitations. When an object is viewed from a radically close distance, an aerial perspective, or taken in through media which alters the passage of time, our senses are greatly extended – beyond those of human beings preceding our time. In effect by perceiving though such media, we have become god-like observers.
For me, the greatest wonders of photography are the ability to extend the animalian lens to the endless frontiers of inner and outer space, as well as the ability to freeze or accelerate the perception of time. My goal is to adhere to those principles the best I can while capturing the mysterious and fleeting phenomena of our natural world, which provide an infinite subject matter beyond our imagination.

b
 

Bethanne Frazer, Philadelphia

I favor the grotesque. I see it as an absolute value, not an opposite of beauty, or something in the way of the pursuit of beauty. The epitome of grotesque is a beautiful achievement. Beauty is a facet of what is grotesque, just as something we perceive as beautiful has grotesque qualities innately. The innate "ick" factor most people have to insects is quite fascinating. I choose to exploit it when possible in my imagery.  I am very interested in the natural world, specifically insects. Much of my artwork features insect imagery. Their otherworldliness fascinates me. I also find most of them aesthetically pleasing, I attempt to get past my inner “ick” factor. I have handled and gotten near to insects in the effort to further my appreciation of them. I stop to take photos and videos of insects. I research insects when I come across one I do not recognize. I appreciate the symbols insects possess in many cultures. Overall, I feel insects represent a lot of what we understand of our world in a microcosmic way. Insects have societal structure and architecture. They are numerous. All the things that influence their world influences ours. I seek meaning when I observe them. 

     
    owls
estraven  

Expedition Leader:
Estraven Lupino-Smith
, Montreal

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the historical and social forces that shape our interactions with the natural world. I am specifically interested in ideas of home and belonging, urban wildlife and spaces of wildness, human and animal migrations, and relationships between place, space, and identity. I am consistently inspired by the transformative nature of artistic expression, the power of collective action, and the wonder of things found outside.

I work primarily as a printmaker to produce multiples and a sound artist who uses the guitar and baritone guitar. In my sound work I draw on samples from the Macauley Library, the largest online database of wildlife recordings. My practice also involves collaboration, both to produce visual and sound pieces, and is informed by interactions with varied environments: natural, cultural, and constructed. I am also a researcher and a writer. As a human geographer, I investigate spatial relationships, specifically the dynamics of natural and cultural spaces, and the human interventions in the imagined geographies of these places.


My most recent body of work depicts nocturnal and crepuscular species. The prints explore the connections between humans and non-human animals through our interactions in shared environments. Many of the animals featured as a part of this series have been vilified, and are still considered pests or dangerous. I wanted to celebrate these survivors, who live among us in cities and other complicated landscapes.

WHITE WAGTAIL
(a villanelle)

Its tail incessantly flails
as it paces up and down the Corniche
while a strong shamal prevails.

Not at all deterred, it rails
against the wind on the beach.
Its tail incessantly flails.

With such finesse, it scales
the seawall without the slightest screech
while a strong shamal prevails.

Such an inspiration as it sails
along – it doesn’t beseech or preach.
Its tail incessantly flails.

Under such conditions, it still nails
the insect – it could teach how to overreach
while a strong shamal prevails.

In winter, its pied plumage pales
as it migrates – feathers blanched as if bleached.
Its tail incessantly flails
while a strong shamal prevails.

.

 

Diana Woodcock, Virginia

        I began taking myself seriously as a poet when I first lived abroad – in the former Portuguese colony of Macau.  In 2010, I won the Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women, and my first poetry book, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, was published.  It marked me as a poet of witness.  By then, I had worked for nearly eight years in Tibet, Macau and on the Thai/Cambodian border. 

       Environmental issues and poetry’s role in educating people about these issues have interested me for a very long time. Many of my published poems may be labeled ecopoetry.  My second full-length collection, Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale (2015) promotes caretaking of not only a tiny oil-rich sheikdom at the edge of the Arabian Desert, but of the whole earth.  My sixth chapbook, Beggar in the Everglades (2016), was inspired by a one-month residency (AIRIE/National Park Service) in the Everglades National Park.  My third chapbook, In the Shade of the Sidra Tree (2010) features poems inspired by the people and land of the Arabian Peninsula. My fifth, Desert Ecology: Lessons and Visions (2014), focuses on the flora of the Arabian Desert.   British poet Helen Farish, in her endorsement of my fourth chapbook, Tamed by the Desert, wrote that my poetry is “reminiscent of Amy Clampitt in its scholarly attention to detail and its rigorous insistence on linguistic precision.”

gabbee stolp
 

Gabbee Stolp, Australia

Gabbee Stolp is an Australian visual artist whose work involves a philosophical exploration of spirituality, mythology and human connectedness with the natural world, together with a belief in the inseparability of life and death.  Using materials thoughtfully sourced from the lives of animals, Gabbee works with small object and jewellery making in order to provoke ideas of the biological and the metaphysical and to inspire a connection with nature through art. 

Currently living in Melbourne, Gabbee has recently completed a Bachelor of Arts
(Fine Arts) First Class Honours at RMIT University. For her major studio work in Object Based Practice, Gabbee created figurative objects to illustrate ideas of human separation from nature in the midst of the Anthropocene and presented these objects as a memorial to extinct species and as an offering of atonement for anthropocentric sins. 

joanne
 

Joanne Madeley, Edmonton

 

In the Fall of 2015, a black bear was found in the river valley near my house.  Running through the heart of the city at 48km in length, the North Saskatchewan River Valley Park is the largest uninterrupted parkland in an urban area in Canada.  Like an apparition, the bear was only seen briefly and then it disappeared from whence it came and the incident has haunted me ever since.  

My recent artwork explores nature’s place in an urban environment.  The bear sighting makes me question what will happen to the richness of the wildlife in the city as it develops and expands.  Edmonton is a rapidly growing city and I question if the local flora and fauna will be reduced to a decorative motif or will it be an integrated part of the city’s overall design.

kuh
 

Peter Palfi

My practice is provocative dealing with issues that require certain self-assurance. In crafted installations I build humorous and unnerving narratives with taxidermy animals or other sourced objects. I construct the installations with an attention to detail while my dry, sarcastic sense of humor is the driving element of my practice. In early sculptural painting works I have demonstrated competent making skills and the ability to think through and build complex physical structures and my interest towards animals has led me to the point where I am now.

My practice is mainly dealing with the idea of using an animal as a form of material while creating a humorous, well-crafted surrounding to modernize taxidermy in contemporary art. I am interested in, how an initial idea can change meaning, once it becomes a physical form.
My practice requires intuitive sourcing skills, where I select taxidermy animals or other, intriguing objects relating to an idea, mainly from online websites. This is a big part of the future outcome, as this selection process determines everything about the piece, including size, theme and narrative. Other occasions, when I have a concept to start with, I taxidermy the selected animal myself, so I can dictate the aesthetics of the piece in every way.

I came to focus with my current practice while I was on an Erasmus placement in Switzerland in my second year of my University studies. Before hand, my long died out passion, was painting with oils on canvas, with portrait based subject. Once I got the courage to let go of the paintbrush, I started to explore and use elements, such as humor and nature in my work.

I also started to use live animals in some of my installations, because my researched has developed to study how people perceive the art piece and what are their emotions towards it when they see a living creature feature in the work.

ugf]
 

Adelle Pound, Northern Ireland

I am a wildlife artist and keen birdwatcher. I work in a number of mediums such as acrylic, watercolour, drawing, collage and cut paper. Fieldwork and drawing from life is central to my practice. This is both a creative endeavour in itself and a way of generating resource material. Studying birds in their natural habitat is a crucial process which drives the ideas that inform the development of new work.

In Northern Ireland where we are visited by migratory birds from across the globe. This seasonal coming and going has be part of life and culture here for as long as there have been people to witness it. I am just the latest in a long line of “watchers”. The birds likewise are the latest in generations that go back into the far distant past.

In May 2016 I  took part, with 11 other artists, in the Copeland Art Project. This took the form of a weekend residency at the Copeland Bird Observatory, followed by a series of developing and evolving exhibitions throughout the summer. This resulted in a short graphic story called “to be Continued”. I am currently researching material for more extended narrative pieces.

chelsea allard
 

Chelsea Allard, Calgary

Humour, honesty and nature are the most important aspects of my practice. Through my use of relatable animals composed in an illustrative style I hope to engage my audience in a way that makes them feel emotionally connected to my characters. Using themes that are inspired by my own struggles with mental health, I translate them through my use of animals and text to create a scenario for viewers that they can empathize with.

Animals are vital to my work because they create accessible characters that prompt empathy more so than with human characters. Animals with human problems seem a lot sadder to us than ​ humans with human problems and this creates a really lovely space to talk about tough situations that everyone struggles with. 

Humour comes into my practice as a natural extension of my own coping mechanisms. It creates distance between the full force of whatever emotional distress is being experienced and allows a temporary relief from existential dread. 

Bioacoustics for artists
BIOPHONY
May 2017
  biophony
hytf
 

Linelle Stepto, Australia

‘All things have the capacity for speech - all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings.’

My area of exploration has always focussed on the animal/human interface.
If we can shift the thinking around our position in the world to question the old pyramidal structure that positions humans at the top, then we may be able to locate a less destructive and more sustainable way of being in the world. 

My practice attempts to reimagine the way we can live in the world, by perceiving the world of the Other. Sound is just one of the sensory pathways into that expanded perception; it is a maker of meaning. 

In work to date, enquiry into the manner in which other animals express their lives, sound becomes de-territorialised, removed from its usual context in an attempt to disrupt the anthropocentric encounter with the world. 

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books, Random House Inc, New York p172

 

natasha
 

Natasha Lushetich, Singapore

I am an artist and theorist. Combining performance, video fragments, sitespecific installations and choreographies, I explore the poetics and politics of relationality, embodiment, and the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge. Sceptical of historiographic models of accounting for past events, discipline-specific knowledge machines, and cultural hegemonies – those invisible articulations of experience that make up lived systems of meaning – I look to liminal practices, discarded spaces, eclectic imponderabilia, and palimpsest-like mediations of information. My purpose in assembling and disassembling patterns, situations, materials, and conceptual ingredients, is to articulate the indeterminacy of coherence and disparity, multiple perceptual velocities, incompatible scales of magnitude, and idiosyncrasy.

My theoretical work focuses on intermedia; aesthetics as ethics; the theories of time and the event; art as philosophy; the production of space; and biopolitics and performativity. An important part of my recent research is also strategic ignorance, agnotology, and the production of what Bernard Stiegler has called ‘systemic stupidity’ (Stiegler 2010). 

The focus of this project is inter-species poetics of space and embodiment, environmental-existential refrains (Guatarri) and their pertaining mnemonic processes (the assumption here is that memory, like knowledge, is environmentally embedded). This includes acoustics, kinaesthetics, spatial perception, and proprioception. I would like to give a talk on (multi-sensorial) interspecies memory.

chitty  

Elizabeth Chitty, Ontario

I make primarily video and sound installations and performances, as  well  as  video,  artist’s  gardens  and  constructed  photographs.  I have worked with community-­‐based strategies  and  within  walking  practice.  My current work  is  place-­‐based  and  focuses  on  a  site’s  geology,  plants  and  birds,  natural  and  built  landscapes,  governance  including  treaties,  histories,  and  water  and  its  infrastructure.  

Although  audio  has  almost  always  been  part  of  my  work,  my  engagement  with  audio  changed  in  2016  with  a  self-­‐directed  residency  at  Warblers’  Roost  near  South  River  ON.  Having  worked  with  sound  artist  Darren  Copeland  many  times  in  the past,  last  June  I  went  to  Warblers’  Roost  under  his  mentorship  to  learn  to  edit  my  own  sound  material  with  REAPER  DAW.  I  also  improved  the  basic  recording  skills  I  first  learned  some  years  previously  with  New  Adventures  in  Sound  Art.  This  has  significantly  impacted  my  practice.  

My  work  is  research-­‐based  and  always  self-­‐directed.  I  would  very  much  benefit  from  working  in  an  environment  of  experts  and  other  artists.  Any  one  of  the  3  residencies  would  provide  me  with  an  opportunity  to  develop  skills,  explore  new  ways  of  working,  and  immerse  myself  in  work  away  from  my  usual  environment.  

     

 

Leap Second
2016/2017

   

And sometimes, mysteriously,
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved Where both deliberate, the love is slight: from the whitehearted water and when we touch As clover’s breath! 
In grass or sand,
But for the lovers, their arms
Who could discern when love was over.

 

Love Poem Explosion 
Krishan Mistry


As we rang in what looked to be a rather tumultuous new year, I was reminded of the old adage ‘Love Conquers All’ (or at least my Facebook newsfeed continued to remind me that we ‘just need more love in this world’). As a poet, I knew that I had a powerful tool of the erotic at my disposal: the love poem. Unfortunately, the residency that I had found my way into only provided me with 1 second to fix the world’s problems with a moving lyric of passionate desire. In fact, as I began to consider the possibilities of computer generation to solve my time related issues, I figured that I might as well take the quantity over quality approach so as to inject the world with as much love as I could. In my one second, I was able to produce over 400,000 love poems for my project, “Love Poem Explosion.”

The algorithm is fairly simplistic and the result of a happy accident that occurred when I was playing around with n-grams. Initially, I had compiled a corpus of preexisting love poems with the hope that a basic ngram model would produce interesting output. It did not. Later I was testing an extremely simple tool which would allow you to combine lines from different poems in a random order. I tested this tool on the love poem corpus and received 10 random lines. The results were surprisingly successful (most likely because these more archaic love poems used similar rhymes schemes and meter). I rewrote my original python script in C so it was as fast as possible and ran the program for 1 seconds. It produced 4526865 lines, a 153mb plain text file.

 

Vestiges
October 2016

   
 

Alia Shahab, Alberta

I investigate the unique relationships that people form with a specific place through their habitation. I create large-scale site-specific installations using natural and found materials offered by the environment that are meant to trigger interactions between people themselves and with their sense of that place - past, present, or future. I spend as much time as possible immersed within the particularities of a specific place to develop a relationship with it. The people and animals I may interact with through that immersion have fostered their own relationships with that space and together we add an important layer to that conceptual landscape. We are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the spaces we inhabit, overlaying traces of the past onto present and future functions of that environment.

     
kuft   Kamille Cyr, Quebec

Articulating around a formal research about shapes and colors, these become the focal point of an ever
expanding corpus. Mathematics and logic are used as a composition system, this system allows an
exploration of scales, colors and shapes.
Structure, symbolism, rhythm and dynamics are used as a way to reflect on the tensions between a
calculative society and a cozy setting. An interest for standardization is enclosed in a playful and
graphical aesthetic.
Subjects such as the middle-class, routine, mass-production, urbanism, the natural world and childhood
becomes points of interest. Visual arts are used as a way of surpassing a description or analysis of the
way we experience our environment.
kuf  

Rosalind Lowry, Ireland

I am a public artist, making site specific based work with groups of people and communities or collaborations with other Artists working in different disciplines, using whatever visual means and materials are suited to the project.
I am particularly interested in land art, and community involvement in the creation of artworks, and have collaborated with several artists on large scale works such as the Art Maze – a site specific work for an annual Agricultural Show.
Materials play an important role in my work, experimenting with natural materials, textiles, paper, paint and printmaking, pushing materials and understanding what they do. I am particularly interested in textiles as a material, with its fragile properties and possibilities.
Working in a rural area has a huge influence on my work and I am mainly interested in taking art to unexpected and unusual places, and using art to create a sense of place, or a shared space. This has particular relevance to Northern Irelands’ divided society.
With a long history of political and paramilitary influence on public art in Northern Ireland I am interested in using traditional techniques and systems but with shared outcomes for the whole community and using art to build community relations

tfi  

Merena Nguyen, Australia

Since completing an Honours degree at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), sculptural ceramics and installation have become my passions. My practice reveals my experimental manner where I combine abandoned furniture with special effects and prosthetics. The SCA faculty and its rich history as a psychiatric hospital (formerly known as the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane) have strongly influenced my practice and attitudes towards my conceptual and site-specific practices.

My works concentrate on notions of uncomfortable issues and anxieties in the contemporary age and its intrinsic relationship to a sense of body identity. My sculptures usually investigate what viewers may claim as the banal, question what may draw them in or perhaps repel them. By using bodily forms like skin and challenging viewers with the unfamiliar, I continually endeavor to reflect this link between attraction and repulsion through surreal installations. The significant feminist surrealists, Gothic literature and the psychological influence of space will continue to be explored in my body of work. There is no doubt that the opportunity to experience, gain insightful knowledge and visions, and networking from the unique Vestiges residency will greatly inspire my ongoing practice and research.

   

Jody Brooks, Georgia

My current work uses prose poetry to explore abandoned buildings, ruined landmarks, and urban decay. I’m particularly drawn to the architecture we erect, venerate, abandon, and ruin. Currently, I’m at work on a collection of flash fiction and hand-drawn architectural elevations about a series of famous sites—Glastonbury Tor, Angkor Wat, the Malwiya Minaret—each of which has suffered through erosion, destruction, and deterioration.  The collection, which explores the memories of our world’s sacred places, tells an unflattering story of humanity.

Attached is a section from Properties of Life, my first chapbook of prose poetry based on the architectural theories of Christopher Alexander. His “15 Properties of Life”—principles Alexander found common to all spaces that feel “alive,” spaces that appeal to us, that draw us in and tempt us to stay—drive the image-making. According to Alexander, all “living” spaces share certain identifiable characteristics, a set of features that keep showing up, again and again. If this is true of buildings, of cities, of landscapes, it might also be true of stories. If these properties define life in physical space, and we can translate them into story form, then maybe we can create a thing that feels alive and whose life is profound, even in the face of pollution, erosion, and human wreckage.

Biophilia
September 2016
   
kuyf  

Heather Layton


The most dangerous disease of humankind is the inability to imagine the world from another person, animal, and/or plant’s perspective. Using 2D, 3D, and time-based media, I construct fictional scenarios that encourage us to look more closely at those we are harming or neglecting in order to see that our fates are intertwined. To recognize the connection between a 68-year-old, Christian woman in Syracuse, New York, and a 22-year-old Muslim man in F.A.T.A., Pakistan, is to recognize our own place in the most exquisitely crafted system imaginable, a place where infinitely large and extraordinarily beautiful worlds exist within the cross-section of a stem.

t   Alison Neville, Utah

Fungi, maps, and political events permeate most of my work. I find them to be bizarre and otherworldly. This being said I cannot understand enough about them. I wonder how they can be combined, what can be learned from them? Are there ways to bring out those things that intrigue me? I examine world events and try to dissect them into understandable pieces. I try to play the scientist. The small and common button mushroom, available at every super-market, becomes the map for a nebula only seen through the eye of the Hubble Space telescope. I use maps to interpret political fragments into the cross-stitches that I can carry with me. Adding little indications of this research to make roads and public buildings. Cordyceps spring up in new varieties that choose kitsch statuettes as their hosts.

ky  

Ashley Carrega, Pennsylvania

I have been living in an American city for 6 years, and this divorced feeling comes from being nurtured on a mountain in my formative years, with a deep connection with the earth and universe. Being in a city it is easy to forget that connection and get caught up in the social aspects of life, which is important, and enlightening in its own right. My work regards the relationship between soul and environment. Environments like the grid of the city, or the serenity of a creek. This opportunity will help me to merge the multiple environments that comprise life.

g  

Christine Moss, Woodstock, NY

I fracture, break, adhere and polish glass and stone of many vibrant colors. I sand rough edges, smear grout in between tesserae and rework older projects into new ones. Wood, stone, fabric, plant matter and insects, feathers, bones, paper and powdered pigments; I love to fit together different textures that tell a dream or a story. One summer I built an underwater city with river rocks re-balanced to shift the flow of water in the creek behind my house. After a few days, the fish were used to my presence and they feasted upon the disturbed silt as I worked alongside them. I forage for wild edibles and potential art supplies. I search and gather in outdoor markets, along roadsides and seashores, collecting little gems as I go.

I preserve and then reflect upon my findings. Time spent in nature is essential. Currently, I am head chef of a vegan restaurant and continually experiment and play with new flavors, aromas and presentations. At night my dreams are tangible, alternate realities with familiar faces and locations that end up in the images I create or the poetry that I write. Then, when the sun rises I quietly watch and listen; entering my studio, I interpret the world around me.

ef  

Cameron Dueck, Hong Kong

Cameron Dueck is a writer, adventurer and filmmaker. His first book, iPad app and documentary film, The New Northwest Passage, tell the story of his voyage through the Canadian Arctic as the captain of his own sailing yacht. He has just returned from an 8-month, 45,000km, 19-country motorcycle journey in research of his second book and film, about Mennonite culture in the Americas. Follow him on Twitter or read hisblog to learn more about his adventures.


 

Quench
August 2016

   
   

Krista Hoeppner Leahy,  NYC

I write about longing and transformation, in all its forms, and hope to catch the edge of the unexpected so that the reader might experience their own eddy of transformation.

The Quench residence feels vital and necessary to me as water, its use, and conflict over its use has never been more important in our world.  Specifically, I am working on a novel where how water connects the inhabitants and lands is central to the story.

I am expanding my previously published story "Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest" into a novel.  The story is a mythopoetic fable combining established archetypal characters (a Quixote, a Midas) with new archetypal characters (a curse-killer, a walking tree).  The world features a dipping pool, waterfall, aqueduct, and ice geyser as some of the entry-points between lands.

uy  

Shu-Ju Wang, Portland


My work has largely been about the profound and sometimes catastrophic transformations of our lives. Since 2013, I have focused on the subject of water— water as giver of life, as identity, as tools for industrialization and exploration, as dumping ground, as power.
Work includes Water, a collaborative artist’s book of two poems with poet Emily Newberry; The Future Dictionary of Water, an on-going community engagement project; two solo exhibits of paintings & mixed media work, FLUID DYNAMICS in 2014 and IMBUE/IMBUERE in 2016. In 2015, I introduced Dictionary in the annual THE RECYCLED RAIN PROJECT where I invited the community to invent and define new words for our future relationship with water. IMBUE/IMBUERE included the work completed thus far, plus 2- & 3- dimensional work about life on the boundary of land and water. The community participation for Dictionary will continue through 2017 and will culminate in a book (an illustrated dictionary). Imbue––to saturate with meaning—derives from the Latin imbuere—to saturate with water. What can be more saturated with meaning than water? Life can not exist without it, thus all meaning in life is dependent upon it.

uy   Muffin Bernstein, New Orleans

The variety and multiplicity of threats to pollinators and pollination generate risks to people and livelihoods, these risks are largely driven by changes in land cover and agricultural management systems, including pesticide use." (UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). 2016)

Nature’s cycle of death and renewal is my continued source of inspiration. These medallions capture isolated and transient moments that highlight beauty and delight. Photographic collages of numerous images, my work seeks to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary -- reaffirming the wonder and intrinsic value of the natural world. Though my own journey as an artist has included setbacks such as health problems and total loss of my catalog of work to an apartment fire, it has been in nature that I have found the will and inspiration to continue creating.

liu  
Elysanne Tremblay, Montreal

Focused on painting, sculpture and installation, my work is
devoted to the creation of places that host all kinds of life-forms interacting with
the environment in which they evolve. I seek to be a sort of servant for natural
auxiliaries by creating an environment where I take pleasure in imagining the
fostering of all forms. With the intention of gaining acceptance into their
community, I shape the landscape of my exploration field as an animal looking for
surprises among the material components.
I enjoy working with the landscape, with the inanimate and the animate
earth. I see the animate elements (as rain and wind) as very active and curious
elements with a creative potential that seek, with human intentions, to participate
and contribute by entering in contact with art. I like performing and dancing with
those elements, showing them my colors and breaking the silence between us.
By creating with nature, I attempt to be a part of this landscape, of all elements
that already converse between each other.

 

Women on the Wing
July 2016

   

uify

 

 
Cecília Bona, Brasil

My work consists on minimum displacements of all sort of things from their common place, such as light, home objects or even stones, in site specific installations or assemblies, to reach the viewers' perception of the phenomena of light, space and time in a very subtle and sometimes ironic way.

Objects and tools that are supposed to measure with precision these phenomena, are many times invented as if they could make them more concrete. As these invented tools fail to measure what we can only perceive, they remind us how unreal everything that seems so precise to us is and teach us how limited we are in opposition to cosmic time and space.

Noticing these phenomena, to which we do not usually give any attention on our everyday routine, demands a certain sensibility, and I can only try to suggest this connection. Standing before art we are more keen and open to perceive what we are not accustomed to.

I try to provoke the impact of the existence of the phenomena using the subject as the center of the experience. Through art it is possible to reframe our point of view, to find a place where integration is found to promote union of humankind, where men step away from their psychological and physical position to just be next to their similar and to themselves, by experience. But once understood, such abstract dimensions throw us on a universe of widened scale leading us to recognize our own unimportance and this requires courage.

 

uyf
 

Lindsey Clark-Ryan, USA

I work primarily in installation and printmaking to investigate the precarious line between the graphic and the object, static and mobile, art and tool, control and chance. While my projects take on a variety of forms and subjects, they are all in service of an observational attitude that is equally absurd in its approach to the quotidian and the extreme. The sensibility is a sly, particular notation of the world that remains consistent whether shopping at Target or launching into outer space. Much of my work is expeditionary or semi-­‐scientific and concerned with either an archivist impulse or the experience of flinging oneself out into the world, literally or figuratively. Several of my recent projects involve a very close attention to objects and to how people interact with and organize their behavior around them.

 

     
kf   Tina Havlock Stevens, Australia
yu   Vaila Robertson, Scotland 

Space traveler. Cloud gazer. Pilot. Air spirit. Sky worshiper. I can’t imagine a better way to describe myself. I’m an adventurer at heart, most at home in a boat at sea or up a mountain or soaring on the yoga mat. The sky was always going to be my next destination. I am currently living in the Orkney Isles of Scotland making art and being blown away by the skyes. There are few places in the world where you can feel so in the sky with your feet planted firmly on earth. The horizon is endless, the line between sea and sky is indiscernible and the exposure to the elements means the changes in the sky are extreme and rapid. While in Orkney I have become fascinated by the scale of the infinite universe so have tried to express the architecture of space, light and time in my work. I have turned solid rock formations into fluid textile designs using digital media, I’ve explored the role of circles and waves as an expression of infinity and I have created sculptures and prints it that try to capture the feeling of being submerged in expansive light and space.  

uy  

Jaq Belcher, NYC

Jaq Belcher’s work is founded in a contemplative process of reduction and repetition. It was a practice she began in 2001 after moving to NYC. Each unique work begins with an unblemished sheet of white paper, a pencil, and countless x-acto blades. Belcher then proceeds to rupture the surface of the paper, slicing thousands of “seeds”, a form, commonly known as the vesica piscis.  The cuts are often in the tens of thousands and are counted prior to the forms being raised, then noted along with corresponding dates along the margins of each work.

Complex patterns emerge; Belcher references cross cultural meditative rituals, sacred geometry, semiotic, mystic connotation to the origins of light, the ebb and flow of nature, and dimensions of the human form and its energy fields. Consciously placing importance on the effect of each individual amendment to the surface of her paper, varying the scale and alternating the “intensity” of cut, Belcher investigates her own personal and spiritual understanding of frequency, creating a palette of white light that can play with the environments the works are seen in. A hybrid between drawing and object, the artist considers them primitive blue prints of alternate states of being. Fields of energy intended to interact with those who stand before them.

 

Kristen Currier, Boston

I grew up moving across the country with my air force family and I’m currently living in Boston. I received my BFA in animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016. I like to combine hand drawn textures with digital composites in mostly mixed media pieces. I focus on cinematography, and try to employ a live action approach to it even when working in animation. My films have been screened in film festivals both internationally and domestically. I have always found infinite inspiration from the sky. I love animated documentary and have strong interests in cryptozoology and aviation.

I spent the last year completing my thesis film Gaining Altitude, an animated documentary about women in aviation history. The film was created after months of research and combines a wide variety of techniques. I really love exploring the forgotten women in aviation. One of my current goals is to work towards getting my own pilots license.  I have a strong sense of adventure and love to explore using my films and sketchbooks. This seems like an incredible opportunity for discovery. I feel strongly that this residency would make a huge and lasting impact on my work.


Creep
July 2016
   


jyr

 
Heather Komus, Winnipeg, Manitoba

I work in mixed media, bio textiles, sculpture and installation, creating my own processes and surfaces that often incorporate embroidery, animal matter and found objects. Drawing upon a deep interest in science, I create highly physical work, investigating our relationship to the natural world. When exploring the abject, I consider attraction and repulsion, the tensions of corporeal experience, and subsequent breakdown of boundaries and loss of control. I am interested in ideas or organisms that seem non--‐binary, existing somewhere between living/dead, organic/industrial, internal/external, as an expression of how we live in the industrial world. In my work I slow and narrow my focus, delving into research, exploring landscapes, ecosystems and textures, embroidering and gathering objects, often referencing slow natural processes like degradation, sedimentation and decomposition. In my highly physical, and intuitive processes, my hands are in direct dialogue with my materials creating textures, tensions, rhythms, sensations and physical reactions. An experience with organic matter, a body or its viscera is like the sting of an insect – it is a genuinely raw and present moment with the body and the natural world.

 

Cole Swanson, Toronto

At the heart of my recent work is a posthumanist exploration of materials and their social, cultural, and biological histories. Embedded within art media and commonplace resources are complex relations between nature and culture, humans and other agents, consumers and the consumed.

My most recent project, Out of the Strong, Something Sweet began with an examination of everyday commodities and their animal-origins. This work centres around an exploration of two potent animal worlds – honeybees and domestic cattle. Connected through pre-modern rituals, allegory, and agriculture, these two species have been agential in shaping contemporary human civilization. Similarly, without human intervention, such animals would not exist in the world as we currently know them.

Through installation, field recordings, painting, and sculpture, my work attempts to bridge the gaps between disciplines and methodologies, combining a sensitivity to the distinct worlds of different species with an awareness of the gravity and agency of animal-symbols pervasive in contemporary culture. It is impossible for humans to understand the worlds of other animals. Out of the Strong, Something Sweet presents a space saturated with interspecies relationships that challenge reductive perspectives on the animal-other that dominate
contemporary life. By reimagining relationships between species, the biological, spiritual, and socio-politico-cultural forces at play become palpable.

luofy

 

Melinda Hurst Frye


Underneath: Views of implied urban subterranean ecosystems and life beneath our toes.

With dirt under my nails, my heart jumps when my hand brushes against a worm in the soil. I am reminded of the world that thrives underground, unsettled by the mystery that is at my fingertips. I watch the beetle make its path through the strawberry plants. Who else is below me making their work in and on the earth? The success and diversity of life near and below the surface contributes directly to life and survival above the surface, however it is a dominant mystery to many. ‘Underneath’ is a series of implied urban subterranean ecosystems, an illustrated look at what lives, dies and feasts at ground level and below. The work is a combination of scans, photographs and digital painting, brought together to build a realistic, though peculiar scene. Exploiting the detail from the high-resolution images, the viewer can examine the underground tableaux closely as it unfolds and reveals itself. The images live in the space between the real and the mysterious to echo wonder and discovery.

 

kufy


  Chloe Rodham, UK

I am an artist, model maker and animator based in the North East of England. I create my work using a combination of stopmotion and digital animation. I regularly gather inspiration from the natural world and have recently started to explore using a variety of gathered natural materials in my artwork. I combine multiple techniques and processes including: armature construction, sculpting, casting, and sewing to create my puppets. I breathe life into the models, manipulating and capturing their forms to create stopmotion animation.

Having been commissioned to produce a number of music videos and short films since graduating from the University of the Creative Arts in 2010, my current goal is to develop my noncommercial artistic practice. I recently created ‘The Illuminarium,’ an exhibition piece which allowed me to explore my particular interest in moths. My present aims are to produce a wider body of artistic work based on the themes and materials I began to explore in this piece. I am particularly interested in exploring opportunities which will contribute to my artistic development.

 

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Amber Chiozza, Houston, TX  

My focus has always been on insects and arachnids, particularly in conjunction with human fascination and repulsion with them. There are many ways that humans anthropomorphize their behavior, including mythology and naming systems. I often highlight these behaviors, and their importance, in my own work. Their difference in scale, purpose, and form fascinates me, and I create books and prints as a means of studying and sharing this fascination.

 I work with printmaking and book arts, and find the tactility of metal and paper to best express my imagery. These both cultivate the use of repetition, and a rich sense of time and narrative. Because both mediums are steeped in the tradition of fine art as well as scientific illustration, I find that I am able to walk the line between the two. Above all, I aim for my work to both educate viewers and rouse curiosity about my chosen subject matter.

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Brenda Petays, Victoria, BC

My work explores cultural identity, cultural adaptation and relationships between people and the land. I am interested in human behaviors, motivations and social interactions. My main method of working is observation. I spend a lot of time watching what people do. Through artworks I interpret my observations – in notes and drawings – which take shape as art forms: performances, installations, paintings or sculptures.I enjoy building collaborative projects within a community and working in an assemblage process with materials often collected from the local environment. I am open-minded to learning new disciplines and skills to push my work forward and explore different ideas/cultures.

Art and craft are a way of thinking about the world that enables me to form and develop my identity and see the identity of others. Art making and communicating through art is a self-affirming activity that helps me to interpret, think about and challenge conventions.  

 

Biophilia: Nocturne
summer 2016

   
uy   Anastassia Kouxenko, Sydney, Australia


Growing up in a working suburb, my access to the natural world was limited, and I developed an obsession for it through documentaries and written works of both fiction and non-fiction. My work has always showcased animals and nature in various forms, particularly in terms of trying to capture its beauty in a way that is neither true imitation nor complete fiction. I have always held a deep fascination for the natural sciences, and after studying both Biology and Ecology they have formed an integral part of my conceptual approach to creating works.

For the past year I have been exploring a theory that there is an inherent link between separation from nature and the development of a particular kind of romance with it; one that is inclined to turn dark and warped while retaining an alluring yet abject aesthetic (as exemplified by the blossoming of Gothic Romance alongside the Industrial Revolution). Currently my practice revolves around using Gothicism and early science fiction as a lens through which to capture nature as it manifests itself in suburban spaces, and the ways in this differs from more ‘natural’ environments.

I work primarily with polymer clay but many of my works also feature gemstones and synthesized crystals.

 
Evan Larson-Voltz, Michigan 

My work centers on ideas of pre-­‐linguistic and root forms of communication. Through blending natural and abstracted systems, my metal work and sculptures point to causality connections and break downs of transformation and mutation. For example in “Protozoa Transforming to Splash” and “Sponge and Protozoa”, juxtaposes droplets and wave patterns to coded languages such as schematics, texts and mapping as a representation landscape of/for the mind. Whereas “A Meta-­‐Fiction” looks at presentation modes that are utilized within the separate contexts of the art world, scientific community and domesticated mantel displays and how they morphologically change one another’s approach to communication. By incorporating natural occurring signifiers and interpretative models, I am able to extrapolate works that share the organic growth of language as an interdependent and universally understood system. Further the examination of such interrelationships suggests a moment of feeling or spirituality, which is created by the meta-­‐ linguistic organizational strategies employed.

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Holly Townson, Toronto

Holly Townson graduated from York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Education. Through the refreshing nature of her work, she amalgamates the grounded and familiar, with the fanciful and bizarre. She explores polarity in her work by embracing severe contrasts through visually stimulating, unpredictable dynamics that mimic synthetic and raw matter. Natural processes of shedding skin and fruition, change, motion, impermanence and connectivity are concepts that inspire her work. Her evolving style often includes saturated hues and flat void spaces interacting with mountainous forms and abstracted fleshes. The suspension of forms in foreign space, existing on the brink of recognition are discordant, yet assume a harmony within their fragmentation. Themes within her work include humankind/nature, utopia/dystopia, chaos and consumption.

 

u   Inga Maria Brynjarsdottir, Iceland

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, graduated from the Icelandic Academy of the arts in the year 2004.
Since then, Inga Maria has been working in the fields of fine arts, illustration, design and animation.

Inga Maria´s work is based on her fascination with nature, wildlife and the oddities and ugliness in life. 
Inga Maria combines real life with the imaginary with a slash of distortion, which varies.

 

Biophilia: Peep, Croak, Growl
spring 2016

   

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  Stephanie Sherriff, California 

My artwork is experiential in nature and tends to manifest as sculptural, media based installations and performances
that are often living, changing, and sometimes dying. In my process I observe, collect, deconstruct, and recompose
found objects, light, plants, scents, video, and audio recordings to create new, abstracted environments and
experiences of the familiar. By recontextualizing the familiar I aim to explore the possibilities of phenomenology in
relation to art.
How do our senses inform objects and act as a conduit for personal experience?

In terms of my own experience, I feel a strong, visceral connection with nature, which is deeply rooted in my attempt
to create new territories and poetic phenomena. I am fascinated with the visual and sonic cadence expressed in the
lifecycles and songs of cicadas, frogs, crickets, birds, and trees, which often act as devices for metaphorical travel
in my work.

Time is also often a key component in the evolution and experience of my work, as elements in each piece change
and exist only in time. For example, my work with grass is an implicit observation of the intrinsic lifecycle of the
material. Without the element of time the work is incomplete. The same can be said of my work with sound and
video, where one moment is extracted, recorded, and then reorganized to create a new sonic or visual landscape
existing in its own space and time. Ultimately I aim to elicit personal connection with abstracted forms through
sensory experience in order to reflect upon human behavior.

 

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Michael McDermott, Philidelphia

 My sound art practice sits at the nexus between present moment awareness, deep time and humanity’s personal connection through listening. I have created works for video, dance, stage, installation, smart phones, multi-speaker arrays, wind sculptures, wishing wells and deep sleep. My work integrates a daily practice of meditation, Deep Listening and textured sound worlds through a process called “sonic photography”. This process involves site specific recordings of physical spaces re-imagined using photographic development and collage techniques. My aim is to re-frame the everyday world as both a grand statement that stretches out in both directions of time and as an ephemeral instant of precious connection. I have a special recent interest in presenting, preserving and contextualizing ecological sound environments. I'm currently working on a project of re-imagined voices of extinct animals using altered sounds of living animals and synthesized sounds. 

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Jeffery Yip, California

I’m interested in combining the physical and digital realms. My creations incorporate found materials arranged in a tessellated array of three-dimensional formations. I overlay these sculptures with geometrically mapped projections of specifically tailored motion graphics. My animations are inspired by reoccurring mathematical patterns found in nature such as the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio and other forms of geometry. As these shapes shift, melt and contort, they highlight the sculpture’s white painted surface with bright vivid colors.

 

In addition, metallic and organic auditory information is added in the form of synthesized sound waves. The transformative textures render rhythmically to the undulating soundscapes of the zaps, bleeps and blaps. With this augmentation, viewers are not restricted to the traditional paradigm of a two-dimensional viewing screen. With playful elements of illusion, I generate themes of my vision of the future, space, nature and alternate dimensions. My intention with this symbiosis of the digitized physical is to simulate a state of consciousness not experienced in our everyday realities.

 

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Nadya Eidelstein, Toronto

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, designer and programmer. Initially, I started my studies as a jewellery designer but the interest in technology and different kinds of media brought me to extend my area of exploration and research into the field of new media. Currently I am working and experimenting with a variety of media and techniques, combining together digital and hand skills to create the hybrids and creatures that reflect my understanding of the current digital age. I am swimming in the huge ocean of new media in search of new ways of seeing and creating and I am widely open for new ideas and collaborations.

 

 

Koizora, Fall 2015

   

Vivian Charlesworth

 

  Vivian Charlesworth

Through the employment of a rigorous research and writing practice, I pull from history, philosophy, science and literature to create immersive environments that assert their own constructed truth. In each artwork, I incorporate a variety of media (sound, lighting, video, found and constructed objects, etc…) that I invite the viewer to investigate and physically engage with. Every environment I create is a full sensory experience that fosters the sensation of stepping into the middle of a narrative.

In my work, I draw inspiration from astronomical history, Victorian spectacle, the military industrial complex and my time recently spent researching and visiting California air force bases, rocket test facilities and NASA research centers. I mythologize the unknown or classified, and attempt to promote a dialogue about environmental disintegration, scientific observation and social responsibility.

 

Jody Arthur

 

 

Jody Arthur

I have held a passport since infancy; travel has always been an integral part of my life and as such, it has always been an important focus of my art practice. This fascination with travel has included work that has touched upon exploration and migration, the beauty of maps, the mechanics and romance of navigation, how location and movement affects identity, and how we imagine life in outer space. As a book artist, writer, and printmaker, I explore these ideas through story and image.

Over the course of several years I created work in response to humanity’s ventures into space flight, exploring the tension between domestic spheres and the practicalities of the NASA space program. This project resulted in collages, large scale drawings, and even cardboard spaceships and playful etiquette brochures for astronauts. When I completed my MFA in book arts and printmaking, my thesis exhibition focused on a personal navigation across the pacific. I studied maps and the navigational practices of native islanders, and developed my own interpretations.

 

Mary ellen Childs

 

 

Mary Ellen Childs

I am a composer who creates both instrumental concert compositions and interdisciplinary performance works. I have long been interested in flight and, currently I am in the early stages of conceptualizing and researching material for a multi-media opera, The Urge to Fly, that looks at the nature of flight and the infinite. The intention of the work will be to explore the human desire to fly as a desire to commune with the infinite, which leads to the opening of – the soaring of – the human heart. At present I envision that the opera will explore various experiences of flight: early unsuccessful attempts to construct strange flying machines; 1930s barnstormers; space exploration; and the experience of a mystic, in the of a knitter who never moves from her rocking chair, but experiences flying nonetheless. 

I believe flight to be a rich and multi-dimensional subject and over time I'm interested in creating additional new works related to the topic. I am especially interested in the spiritual dimensions of flight, the emotions of flight (from trepidation to euphoria), the imagination of flight (early designs for strange flying machines, for instance), and flight in all of its incarnations (a bird; a kite; clouds; a child swinging; a leaf falling; bombs falling; the arc of a baseball through the air), and the mystery of the night sky.

 

Sandi Milford

 

 

Sandi Milford

I am an Edinburg, Texas based artist who has a desire to blend the fields of science and fine art.  My background is grounded in an understanding of biology and life sciences, followed by an exploration into the field of fine art.  My current work involves an appreciation for all things living, with an emphasis placed on the mechanisms needed to produce life and how precise they need to be for everything to function properly.  I have been using 3-D printing to represent sculptural forms from nature and place them on the body, as well as experimentation with installation pieces.

I am currently taking time to work on my portfolio and experiment with new mediums.  I pursued a B.S. of Biology followed by a B.F.A. with emphasis in CAD-CAM/Jewelry/Metals from the University of Texas – Pan American.  During my B.F.A. I was a supplemental instructor for a Genetics course and that experience greatly influenced my understanding of the body and in turn my current work.  Originally focused on illustration, creating in 3-D has opened up many possibilities for me.  Future plans are to make biological sculptural forms interactive, and experiment with installation and performance pieces.

 

Samwell Freeman
 

Samwell Freeman

I make software and hardware. My artwork is interactive; aiming for interactions that activate pictorial space, transforming the viewer of a piece into a participant or even better-- a creator! My software functions as a platform for creativity, facilitating drawing, image mash-ups and programming novel processes. The hardware I make includes printed circuit boards, drawings, paintings, fountains, and kinetic sculptures. They are augmented with electronic sensors, able to react to their surroundings. Accelerometers, gyroscopes and joysticks interface between the virtual and physical worlds. These gadgets enable the pieces to become tactile. Whenever I see a sign that reads ‘Please Don’t Touch the Art’, my heart sinks. Please touch my art! I hope it will touch you too.

 Art asks questions. The quiet, contemplative space of visual art allows critical inquiry into technology, instead of the vapid and breathless glorification we see in the marketplace. Repurposing obsolete technology, and irreverently deploying current ones, can teach us about our lives as aging cyborgs. I'm looking for a starry synthesis of the shiny speedy electron and the soft wrinkly human. In a matter of decades, electric technology has extended our central nervous system across the globe and connected it with almost every living person. The impact of this on our society and on each of us individually is so profound that it is almost impossible to talk about. Through carefully programmed interactions the assumptions and demands underlying electric technology can be rendered in plain sight. As Samuel Johnson said about poetry, I want to make familiar things seem new, and simultaneously make new things feel familiar.

     
Biophilia, Fall 2015
   

Lucie

 

 

Lucie Strecker, Germany

 My work focuses on the relationship between ecology and performance, which has influenced theories of action/reaction, audience/player, somatic techniques, improvisation or other systems of training and collaboration. I query concepts of ecology and Umwelt and how they have changed since biotechnology reproduces or synthetic biology has engineered life, and placed it in the ambiguous realm of being created both naturally and technologically. I consider the theoretical understanding of biological materiality as well as the tangible creation of experimental settings, in which the used media change meaning and latent narrative structures become perceivable, as crucial for the development of my performance practices. Along the relation between apparatuses, humans and non-humans, I develop texts, choreographies and scenographies that deal with the ontological changes, new normative assumptions and ethical concerns, that life itself faces under the influence of technological biodesign and new orders in ecological systems.

 

Bad feeding

 

 

Karolina Żyniewicz, Poland

 The core of my interest is the balance between nature and culture, as represented through visual arts. Nature provides me with a setting or environment to examine area aesthetics. Having abandoned the making of representational work, I developed my preference for objects and installations that require interaction. Art, to my mind, should be an investigation similar to science. The most important aspect is the process. The piece of art or exhibition exists for some time and then disappears, as do all living things. It is about asking questions, researching and seeking adventure. A major factor in my work is curiosity. I am interested in all aspects of the natural world and while I can't know or learn everything, art allows me to use every area of knowledge without specialisation. It is a place for making relationships between different layers of thinking. I value and appreciate cooperation with people, the transfer of knowledge and sharing experiences. This was the motivation of my recent collaborations with Departments of Education in both the Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery Zachęta in Warsaw.

 

     

Maria

 

 

Maria Dmitruk, Poland

I am a multimedia artist, whose projects focus on involving audience – I’m very interested in all kinds of interactive projects. My means of expression on one hand include installations open to a dialogue with space and on the other hand, objects – sometimes small – which focus  on details, structures and textures showing the unity in diversity among organic forms. Natural sciences have always been a great passion of mine. As I progress along my artistic path, I become more and more aware of the importance of ecological issues. I try to avoid synthetic materials – it is a gesture of respect for the Earth and its produce. Besides, I think no other substance is as noble, as the one coming directly from the nature itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
I have developed a number of projects using soil; recently I turned to bio-art in its more precise meaning. At the moment, I’m working on my PhD project, which concerns plant physiology; specifically speaking – the phenomenon of etiolation. The darkness, I’m dealing with, is a natural condition, permanently present in most of the Universe. Darkness on our privileged planet, which is natural, seems to be conceptualised as an instance of absence –  an absence of light, which influences vegetation in nature and influences human mind. Darkness represents both existential anxiety and concern about the future of natural environment.                
Projects, which I develop, require a lot of meticulous work and of an interdisciplinary co-operation with scientists and technology experts – it’s not the number of projects that matters to me, but their meaningfulness. This style of work makes me concentrate on the process of creation and I find  it important to share it with others.   I believe that an intellectual community of like-minded people, who are at the same time individuals coming from different backgrounds can benefit with a significant  and universal change.    

 

 

 

Adrian E. Rivera, NYC

Technology exists only in the presence of living beings. In the same way those beings are formed by nature around them. My work is derived from a source object or concept, the structures grow and deform in response to it’s surroundings. As new structures are formed pre-existing ones may shift and bend in the wake of new matter. As I imitate aspects of the natural world I wish to provide organisms the ability to take forms not seen before by removing control and allowing living matter to grow onto the structures I have created. In doing so the remains of previous beings are consumed and integrated in a new whole. 

My work is often dependent on a self imposed limit of time; this creates a sense of urgency which allows me to create intuitively. This fluid workflow translates to the final piece. My materials include things such as 3D printed plastic, animal bones, mycelium, moss and other plants.

 

Biophilia, Summer 2015
   

anika

 

 

Anika Schneider, USA

Our society has a poor history with environmental stewardship. One of the cultural ideas we need to wrestle with in today’s environmental crisis is whether we are a part of nature or apart from nature. As the media plays such a significant role in our society in shaping our ideas and opinions, I scoured news stories to better understand how the media presents the natural world. In these news stories, I discovered themes of struggle between humans and the environments in which we live. From stories of combatting floods, forest fires, tides, etc., humans were presented as not living with nature but rather battling it and attempting to keep natural forces at bay. In my paintings, I pair contrasting painting techniques of thin drippy glazes and thick brush strokes to depict this tension between man and nature. My paintings have an aura of mystery, which is created through unclear subject matter and a layering of paint to capture how unsettled and vulnerable humans feel when constantly battling their environment, instead of living with it. As I worked with news stories, I began to place landscapes from my life and my own self into the paintings to question my own place in the natural world.

 

imaculate dissection
 
Michael Barraco, NYC
Immaculate Dissection

I am a Brooklyn based artist interested in exploring the blunt physical reality of existence through the use of organic materials. Spider webs, insects, found road kill, and vernacular photography all have a place in the construction of my work. By combining these elements and changing their context I create objects that elicit an immediate, visceral confrontation with the material, while at the same time also creating a clinical distance from the subject matter. The effect is one of anesthetized physicality, and it allows me to materialize the intangible while also making very clear distinctions between reality and illusion.

Drawing upon my accrued secular perspective and the mundane violence of the everyday, I aim to engage in a dialogue that reflects the conflicts, emotions, and failures that arise in daily experience. My focus on the physical presence of objects and their ephemerally arises from the contemplation of my current perspective, which contrasts strongly with the intangibility of the spiritual universe of my Catholic adolescence.  I believe by more fully immersing myself in the environment of my subject matter I will emerge with a greater understanding of my practice.

lemay

 

 

Marjorie Lemay, Montreal
In the last 15 years, through drawing, painting, etching and photography, and in a desire to capture its essence, I developed a hybrid visual language that enables me to project myself into the Animal and unveil my singular imagination. As an artist, I continuously strive to renew my creativity and explore new ways to harness matter and refine my graphic language. My work tends to adopt a narrative shape and experimental film (especially animation) appears to me as a way to orchestrate my visual language with a new sound dimension. My work has been presented in thirty events and group exhibits, particularly at the 2005 Junction Arts Festival in Toronto, the Joyce Yahouda Gallery in 2004 and at the 2004 Photomahon (Montréal/Guadalajara edition). My last exhibition, Ursus Maritimus,was presented at Maison de la culture Frontenac de Montréal in February 2008.
My animation films Les Nocturnes and Auscultation of the Heart produced at Mel hoppenheim School of Cinema in 2010-2012 
received significant recognition and acclaim in many important national and international film festivals.
Since 2012, I am a new mom and I have the chance to experience working as an educator and a teacher assistant in different contexts and schools with adults, teens and children. I feel that it nourishes my art practice a lot and help me understand more about collaborative works. I am also currently collaborating with a theater group (Le Théâtre du Cerisier) creating animated sequences for a puppets show that will be shown to teenagers in 2015-16.
As an MFA student in Film Production since September 2014, I am exploring different cinematic approaches to celebrate nonhuman life forms, Sanctuaries and wildlife preservation. In a continual quest for finding ways to engage the spectator in a dialogue with Nature, I am really excited to participate to residencies like yours that celebrate Art and Science and Nature. I have just finish writing a paper about Nature and Sound Art and I would like to experiment more in that field.

 

 

 

William Scully, USA
Nature is the inspiration for my photographic work and I enjoy seeking out and probing into overlooked microcosms within the natural world. With an approach to art that is both exploratory and methodical, I look for gesture in nature by wandering natural realms with my camera and sampling the many variations in light and atmosphere that change with time and season and weather. The sensual quality of my artwork reflects the physicality connecting me to the environment as I photograph. Engaging nature in this way, I explore the landscape and embed the experience in my art.

My educational background in engineering and actuarial science has given me a studious approach to art, and the results of my photography often lead me to more in-depth research on my subjects. Recently I have been studying lithographic printing techniques for reproducing my work. Full of many variables, lithography involves a complex craftsmanship that I find appealing to both the artistic and the analytical aspects of my personality. This intertwining of exploration and learning through art is what I find most compelling about being an artist. 

 

Deamond

 

 

John Deamond, USA
My work explores the border of the human and the natural through processes often on the borders of photography. Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) builds a process that captures the spirit of a place through its leavings: those parts cast on the ground to decompose or grow into new plants. These two types of leavings are the summation of the natural processes of a place; the beginning and end of life cycles occur side by side and feed one another, entropic and organizing processes work together to build a biological community. Like all of my recent work, I consider these pieces to be environmental portraits: ways of telling nature’s personal story, whether it be of Nova Scotia, the Chesapeake Bay, or even contemporary attitudes toward extinction. A Field Guide to the Extinct and Extirpated Birds of North America takes on the latter. Through a book and collection, this work guides visitors through my investigations of extinct North American birds. It juxtaposes images and data from natural history institutions and eBay with traditional field guide pages to tell the continuing story of these birds; how, despite using them until they were gone, we continue to find new uses. 

 

Geophilia, Summer 2015
   

 

Karen Abel is a Canadian artist and naturalist based in Toronto. Her site-sensitive installations and public art works consider, engage and accommodate 21st century urban ecology and biodiversity. Concerned with ephemera and ‘slow art’ processes, Abel is interested in contributing to a culture of ecology through research-intensive, season and time based practices. She holds an interdisciplinary Master in Environmental Studies from York University in environmental art practice, cultural production and community art. Abel has realized art gardens and permanent ecological art projects through public art initiatives with the Ontario Science Center and Walpole Island First Nation. She received the 2013 Ontario Association of Landscape Architects/GROUND Award for GeoGarden {A subterranean symphony in C}, a landscape-themed project about geological time and the musicality of natural processes. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Jury’s Choice Award and Ontario Association of Landscape Architects/GROUND Award for Vernal Pool, a participatory art project about water, place and precipitation.

 

 

Heather Vida-Moore, Canada

My process involves making investigations into psychology, consciousness and identity through research, experience and experiments. While I am motivated by engaging with concepts, my ideas are transferred into my work intuitively, as I try to stay receptive and let the piece inform me of its needs. I sometimes use my own life experiences to fuel my practice and interrogate things like the abject, fragmentation, transformation, and the value found in both suffering and healing.
While I often feel the impulse to treat my pieces as problems to be solved, my method of resolving a piece is usually through the disruption of comfortable preferences, and I enjoy the tension created by ambiguity or displacement. The act of making art is for me both meditative and intensely stimulating, and I hope for such a response on the part of the viewer as well.
 

Andrew Godsalve, Canada

My work is an exploration of human perception and landscape, within the context of geologic and digital-photographic processes. By using photography and the geological record in referencing space and time, and collapsing the boundaries traditionally imposed by these dimensions within the digital canvas, I explore new ways of envisioning the earth within the image. Geological formations are the focus of my work; I am drawn to the contrasts and surprising similarities between processes of geology and digital photography. Rocks which have undergone millions of years of transformation translate into forms of digital information and light in a fraction of a second, both events carrying equal degrees of intangibility for the human observer. My work is inspired by the unexpected results of collisions I create between these “inaccessible” processes, on opposite ends of our temporal spectrum.  
My practice involves choosing a location of interest and photographing it extensively, building an archive of images which are subsequently used as material in creating a digital collage. The photos are fragmented and “recombined” into radical new forms in the digital canvas, eschewing conventional landscape reference points. The completed forms challenge the viewer with new depictions of geologic time and human space, provoking a re-appraisal of the substance of our world and our own presence upon it.
 
Thea Fridman
, Israel

I choose to imitate nature but the result is not necessarily mimesis: By following and observing nature I am stimulated to create new figurative and nonfigurative shapes that echo my inner self.
My biography and my connection to other circles around me find expression through the use of objects and impressions that I collect in both the natural sphere and in urban spaces.  Dialogs between one and the many, the active and the non-active, the observer and the observed, play an interesting and significant roll both in nature and the urban arena. I find that the most significant moments of my work is when the border between the object and my self-awareness blurs. The object becomes an extension of my consciousness.

Art as a way to metamorphosis Most of my work is produced over long durations of time. The work as a whole and as a fragment of a larger whole, changes through time.

The fragment is a whole: Through observing or using pieces of nature, a joy of creativity is awakened in me and I feel one with the universe. Through my art I find focus and understanding of new concepts by seeing the fragments as a whole.

The text is the medium It can appear as a word, an image, a gesture or a sound. My text is the appearance of my existence.  

My biography comes into the frame of the work, as a substance and as a way to celebrate life and facing its challenges. 

The work of art Is my way to give and find meaning, to appreciate life and except death.

A.Vi* – Art Virus In its way to impact life – the work of Art should act as a Virus : in every possible space or time.

Koizora, Spring 2015
 

 

 

Noelle Mason, USANoelle wilson


 

Decision Altitude: Incident Report uses the medium of photography in an attempt to capture an image of the physical space and compression of time between throwing yourself out of the door of an aircraft and saving your own life.  In this buffer zone between earth and sky the view of earth from above is anything but the sterile experience of cartographic representation, it is instead an incomprehensible combination of aerodynamics and adrenaline. Incident Report uses a lens-less pin-hole camera which does not refract light but instead allows the image to imprint itself directly onto a piece of film over a period of three seconds hereby capturing 500-feet of free-fall at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour. The process of taking these images includes a pinhole camera affixed to a specially designed helmet and shutter release.  I wear this contraption on my head the entire duration of exit, freefall, canopy flight and landing.  I cannot see what the camera sees so the images are composed with a great degree of chance.  Coordinating our exits, my subject(s) and I jump from 13,500 feet in the air.  This altitude provides me with one minute of freefall in which to compose and take the photograph.  My subject and I must then match vertical fall rates, move into close proximity with one another then as I release the shutter hold as still as possible for between 500 and 1000 feet (3 – 6 seconds.)   Most of the images generated by this process provide little or no recognizable information but the ones that succeed at capturing this absurd performance become un-refracted indexical marks of a human being falling through space and time recorded in photosensitive gelatin.  The photographic negatives are then used to make photogravures. I was attracted to this printing process because of it’s historical significance and the highly physical image that is produced.   
Each image is then paired with text from the United States Parachute Association archive of “Incident Reports” which are the official reports from people who have died while skydiving.  The reports that have been selected are of personal significance to me either because of the type of malfunction or because of the person or people involved. 

 

Dana Boll, NYC, USA
dana

 

How can we fly without leaving ground?  Commit to something beyond ourselves? That moment of acceleration on the runway, cleared for takeoff, no turning back, a complete commitment to speed, elevation…and lift-off.  What does it take to soar, to capture that feeling in the body, and transmit it mid-story?
I am passionate about storytelling through the integration of text and movement. My artistic practice attempts to use movement and dance to give voice to the unspeakable parts of a story – whether in devastation, boundless joy, or apathy. 
The work I am currently creating, My Toothbrush Killed an Albatross is an environmental dance-theatre musical about how a transatlantic flight changes a man’s life.  My research for the work includes ocean-polluting plastics, albatross legends, weather patterns, and the pursuit of flight.  The work will depict the experience of flight on several levels: in a passenger aircraft, with a dancer (and/or puppet) as an albatross bird-spirit, and an ensemble musical dreamscape where the human chorus all “take flight.”  Topics of my past dance-theatre work and research have included the experience of WWII refugees, addiction’s effect on families, square dancing, and swordfighting.

     

Melaina Todd, BC, Canada
melaina todd


 

Melaina Todd is an artist whose practice involves drawing, painting, collage, murals, editioned prints, monotypes, performance, mail art, design, sculptural print and GIF's. Her goal is to activate a picture plane by questioning the “original” image and considering the many ways it can be reproduced. She is an educator at Kamloops Art Gallery, teaching printmaking and other mediums. Melaina is an active member of the Kamloops Printmakers Society in Kamloops BC and a BFA graduate from Thompson Rivers University in 2011.
She is interested in the purely cathartic actions of drawing and printmaking. Gaining a finer understanding of her subjects is discovered during the two-dimensional processes she uses. A common theme of her drawings and prints is the natural world and the dilemmas of modern existence. Melaina's goal is to create work that is easily disseminated into multifaceted mainstream culture and allowed to mutate/develop through the mediums of time, history, social engagement and media. She engages viewers by displaying her process (such as the carved blocks of woodcuts) and encourages learning and interrogation. She believes the viewer should be subjected to the process of an art work, and also learn how to decode their own experience in a world full of images that seemingly appear from thin air.

 

 

Biophilia Spring 2015
   


Marynes Avila

 

 

Marynes Avila, Australia
The Public Narratives of Multiples: A Language of Transcendence

Marynes Avila is an Argentinean born Melbourne artist who implements the use of multiples as “data connectors” by investigating the uniqueness of each unit and its interrelationship with the group. Involving overwhelming quantities of a single familiar object, generating collaboration and interaction, Avila explores the resonance of multiples by utilizing them as tools of public intervention.
Avila’s practice is multidisciplinary, her repertoire gravitating between labor intense site-specific installations, sculpture, meticulous drawing, digital photography and film.                            
From topics as varied as cells to mass production, the artist investigates the public narratives of multiples as a reflection of the personal and the universal, the profound and the abject, chaos and order. Redefining the object, its purpose and symbolism, Marynes Avila’s practice is informed by Science and Nature, particularly Biology and Neuroscience, Carl Jung's concept of the Collective Unconscious and Depth Psychology. Recently the artist has produced a new body of work that includes microscopic digital photography of organic material and familiar objects. The magnified images reveal a world of multiplicity invisible to the naked eye.

 

Julya Hajnoczky, Calgary

julya

 

The extraordinary details of the natural world never fail to amaze me. The quiet work of plants, animals and insects, so easily ignored by humans, is what interests me the most, and what I constantly return to for inspiration. Much of my work is a sort of meditation on the interactions between people and nature, on the ways in which we attempt to control and codify nature, yet hold ourselves as somehow separate. My pieces attempt to frame the work of plants and animals in terms that are easier for humans to understand, and potentially empathize or identify with. I hope to inspire a sense of wonder or fascination, and encourage the viewer to consider the energy and resources that go into the constant cycle of building and decay in complex environments and ecosystems.

     

Michelle wilson

 

Michelle Wilson, Canada

‘Becoming animal’ is a common idiom in contemporary discussions of human-animal and nonhuman-animal relationships, but are we not already, and always have been animal? I have come to understand the term as describing a state of attentiveness to our animality. In this state we become concatenated, recognizing the light of personhood in the eyes of another animal looking back, acknowledging that singularity is not synonymous with humanity.
The creatures I create are born out of living body-to-body, heart-to-heart, with my nonhuman companions, past and present. Our fleshy and vulnerable undersides exposed to one another, eyes asking, “Can you feel me?” I see a material; plasticine, clay, wax, soft downy roving and they combine with my thoughts and fears, the books I’ve read, and my dog Scooter’s gestures, his looks that tug on my insides. The outcome of my making is intuitive, but in no way mindless, and the affective power of these creatures remains beyond the grasp of my words, the means of my rational language. The deerhounds and fetuses I generate are both internal and external creatures, living and dead, of us and yet distressingly foreign. We want to pull them into us to comfort, but are uncertain of their diseased flesh. They are art objects and affective interlocutors appealing to us with their gaze.

 

julya
 
Julya Hajnoczky, Canada

Our relationship with the natural world is fraught. Humans are part of nature, but in many ways we behave as though we were somehow above it. It is this contradiction that I am interested in exploring in my work – the conflicted territory between my awe and wonder at the fascinating ecosystems that surround me, and our ultimately (self-)destructive human impulse to collect, codify, classify and control our environment.
An intimate connection to wilderness and nature has long been inextricably linked to popular definitions of Canadianness. My own experiences have been no exception, having spent much of my life enjoying the wilds. My work is informed by these experiences, and by popular Canadian cultural references. The tradition of Cabinets of Curiosities, those theatrical natural history installations, is another strong influence. In attempting to convey my fascination with even, or especially, the tiniest features of the natural world, I’ve adopted a multi-disciplinary practice. A camera-less version of historical photographic processes allows me to use pressed plants, feathers and other collected specimens in place of photographic negatives, my enlarger standing in for a microscope while the metal and glass photographic plates produced let me share the exquisite details of the barbs of a feather or the veins of a leaf. Meanwhile, drawing on my multicultural heritage (another oh-so Canadian identifier), I use Hungarian embroidery skills learned as a child to imagine strange and impossible, yet still beautiful, hybrid Canadian creatures. For me these creatures serve as a reminder of the interconnectedness of all beings in an ecosystem, but also evoke the danger of human over-involvement in directing the fate of the natural world, while playing on popular representations of Canadian culture, including ideas of multiculturalism. Finally, my intricate paper sculptures are another slow and meticulous mode of making that allows me to meditate on subject matter drawn from nature. The material link between the paper and the trees from which is it made is important, as is the scale of the work: natural resources are precious, and I strive to keep my footprint small. Creating tiny, delicate, fragile representations of the animals and plants that are important to me hopefully conveys my sense of the preciousness and value of the living world surrounding us.


nicole edmond

 


 

Nicole Edmond, Canada

“Number of microbes per square centimeter of human skin: upward of 100,000” Invisible Kingdom by Idan Ben-Barak

In my practice, I am fascinated with the world of microbial life which is invisible to the naked eye. This curiosity with the invisible is similar to the scientists and artists exploring how things worked in the 1500’s, with theatre painting and drawings of the dead. They too used observations to draw images of anatomies and these drawings to this day are used in human anatomy to education on things that can’t always be seen to the naked eye. My prints work in a similar fashion to these theatre paintings. The viewers are peering into the small world of microbial life, something that is a mystery to most people. In this way this imagery is a reflection of my own curiosity with microbial life and the pursuit of knowledge. According to quote above by Idan Ben-Barak, 100,000 microbes and more are on our skin, this number is exactly why I am so fascinated with cellular life. The fact that there are more than 100,000 microbes on a square centimeter of human skin without anyone entirely being conscious about it is both terrifying and exhilarating.

 


 

 

Carol Howard Donati, Canada

A part of me, otherwise unspoken, becomes articulate while creating with my hands. I draw from inner expression, my background as an anthropologist, my appreciation of traditions of women’s work and design ideas taken from everyday life.  Referencing the familiar and the virtual hiddenness of things we take for granted is the starting point for my examination of broader issues of human concern such as questions of personhood, health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and global food security. I am drawn to natural fabrics, typically working with cotton, linen or silk, enhancing these with various layers of texture using dyes, paint, appliqué and stitch.
I frequently incorporate found objects and domestic materials in my work, juxtaposing ubiquitous household disposables with natural forms and colours as a way to provoke awareness. As an artist, my virtual sketchbook is nature photography. I live near the Petrie Island Wetlands and find taking photos there a meditative way to access creative thinking. I am always eager to expand my knowledge and experience of the natural world as a way to open to my senses and connect with inspiration.

NATASHA
 

Natasha Avila, Australia

My work explores the characteristics of the reflected image within the context of the wearable object. Utilizing reflective surfaces, the aim of the work is to produce spatial rediscoveries by deconstructing, transforming and emphasizing details. The work morphs depending on its surroundings and the wearer’s contact with it. The amalgamation of shiny, reflective mirror surfaces and the impermanent nature of the reflected surrounding environment transmit ever-changing visual statements. Characterized by the elegant simplicity of geometric forms, vertical and horizontal planes and interior and exterior spaces, my work articulates a sense of order and balance. Under close inspection, each piece provides an interstitial space where reflection becomes a reversal of the observer and the object - a vehicle for the projection of the self. In addition, my work currently explores textures in the surrounding environment.

 

Below Zero Winter 2015

   



 

Charlotte Smith, England

I like creating things that are Interactive and Site Specific. (And preferably raise a smile)

 


 

  Siena Baldi, USA

Trying to make sense out of irrational occurrences compels me to draw lines and make connections. Either drawn, sliced out of wood, or sewn into fabric, lines represent direction and reassurance. This desire to impose order on chaos recurs in my artwork. I am interested in the overlap of orderly, mathematical forms with organic, abnormal forms.  Methodically tracing an idea or object to create a new, more abstract form emphasizes certain formal qualities. As the tracing continues, the form evolves into a seemingly arbitrary assortment of lines. This generative approach strips the original meaning and creates a shell that can be filled in with new meaning, a new system of order.

When faced with an infinite expanse, drawing constellations suits our desire to tame the sublime. My connections and diagrams are just as valid as anything else. However, at a certain point, my eagerness to impose order becomes futile and my process consumes itself as it cycles into chaotic inscrutability.

 


 

 

Nicole Valentine Rimmer, BC, Canada

An attraction to organic forms is what shapes my style, while nature is what inspires and motivates me. Elements of my work often come from a specific place, moment in time, or season that moves me to create something from it. Often a color palette jumps out from a winter landscape or lush spring forest bringing with it a shape or form that I can create out of glass or metal.

My work often stretches the limits between glass and metal. Glass can be considered a super-cooled liquid while metal is a solid. Combining both elements can often create an alchemy that moves the piece to another time or place. While glass can be fragile it can also be transformed into a solid structure that can last decades or generations. Metal, being strong and supportive, can also flow and shape itself into something completely different from its original form.

I have always been particularly drawn to snow, frozen lakes, storms and all that they bring. They take me to a childlike place inside myself where a sense of awe exists. A stark winter landscape can make one feel alone – or surrounded by nature and all its elements. Falling snow takes me to a magical place deep inside where unique and different creations come from.

 

Geophilia Fall 2014
   

anna

 

Anna Carr Kodama, USA

Geophilia
.  The word's new but I know the feeling. A few years ago, I couldn’t look on life, so I turned to the earth itself.  It felt right to pull apart an old stone wall, to haul the stones and lay them out in an ancient pattern with a compass and string. It felt right to walk the path I’d made, twisting round and round, but always ending up in the center of things, always coming out. A man repairing the roof asked, What’re you doin back there in the woods? I showed him this sea of stones. Took his breath away.  He got started on the path and couldn’t get over how lost it made him feel and then, when he made it to the middle,  how found.  The next day , he brought a stone to add.  Then others came, friends and strangers --- more stones, more stories, more footsteps.

            Many nights now, I sleep in the labyrinth. Though it's not a living thing, it’s not exactly nonliving either. These stones brought me back to life. They are witness to the mystery of creation---earth’s own big bang  and our human small ones…. all of our making and being.


final dance

 

 

Gabrielle Giordano, USA
Final Dance

universal energy connecting all living things
opening up your senses to discover the natural rhythms of the universe
molecularly inter-woven into the environment
being moved
floating upon qi
we exist

Creation is an inseparable part of my nature. I believe art accesses our inner most places and helps one discover its true nature. It is an unfiltered response to our existence to our gender, culture, class, society, geography, and sexuality. All of these forces push and pull us to develop ourselves further. A visceral understanding of human experience creates sharing. The human body is a vessel for communication; the poetry of the body is understood as emotion. Dance, movement, and gestures express our humanity using archetypal images connecting all people and inviting them into the work. Expanding your possibilities of dynamic through using imagination and imagery to increase understanding of body and mind. Art is a gateway to unanswerable questions. It helps to see our deeper
connection with the rest of the universe. We dance and life is our subject.

muladhara

  Katherine Valkanas, Canada
Muladhara

In attaining my masters certification in Mikao Usui Reiki I have developed a deeper understanding of how healing the metaphysical body also positively affects the physical body. Reiki is a bioelectromagnetic-based therapy that affects the surrounding and inner body. It focuses on balancing the electromagnetic fields in the body to bring individuals to a tranquil state. This type of healing therapy has inspired the creation of my lithographs, specifically the series of organ structures. These sculptural prints represent the seven main chakras, which are signified through the chosen colours and crystal forms for each organ. Throughout my time working in print media I have been drawn to creating work that is inspired by my personal spiritual practice. From graining the stone to the final stages of lithography printing and paper assemblage, these series of repetitive actions act as their own mantra. Sculptural works such as Unstruck focus on the exploration of crystal formations through texture, shape and colouration. These works reflect my curiosity for understanding the origin, environment, elemental formula and metaphysical properties of crystals. Through exploring a variety of art mediums I strive to represent both the physical, metaphysical and healing qualities of crystals.

Alyson O'Malley, New Zealand

 

Up in the Air Somewhere, Flipping White Pages with out Poems
2013, onopordum acanthium

My practice is based on a formal exploration of materiality as metaphor. The idea of materiality as a metaphor contributes a renewed interest between the object and the spectator in the question of being, transcendence, and the social by way of its physicality. A recurring theme throughout my practice is the focus on the romantic unity and underlying tension between humans and nature. Temporal installations underline the fragility of nature in man’s world, yet appreciates the beauty of organic objects. Zen is a departure point throughout my research, as it resonates with the use of organic forms in contrast to the artificial. Poetic gestures allow a moment to be mediated by a physical directness with an interactive event. Modern industrial material in juxtaposition with organic form offer a threshold for transformation, surpassing everyday identity to become a bare material presence in itself. Playing with permanence versus impermanence explores this idea of a fleeting moment. Cut-continuance articulates the experience of this passage of time, the moment of the in-between, where one becomes aware of the pause between exhalation and inhalation. The contrast of
movement and stillness, impermanence and permanence, flow and cut-continuance speaks of the space as infinite.

Sarah Gillett, England
I think I am an Ominous Decoration, 2014, Tapstry, 300mm x 170mm
Ominous

 

 

I am a 'draw-er', collecting stories from folklore, history and science to create new work that sites our own lives within the epic narratives of earth, sea and sky. My influences include The Pennines (mountain range in the North of England), 18th Century engravers, dictionaries and radio drama and my multidisciplinary practice reflects these interests in text, image, sound, film and performance.
From starting points of imagination, memory and mythology my work examines our expectations of narrative, through a breadcrumb trail of objects, actions and landscapes that uncover the symbolic power of stories in society, politics and communities. From the Aboriginal Dreamtime works to standing stones such as Stonehenge and the statues of Easter Island, from the disasters of Pompeii (natural) and Hiroshima (man-made), our relationship to land, its geology and cultural / mineral value results in rich and complex stories. As my work starts with physical objects including rocks, fossils and corals, the material process of making-by-hand is very important, and as a consequence I make lithographs on stone, etchings on copper, monoprints using textured wallpapers. I record sound outside or in a natural space rather than in a studio, as I want to hear the air.
My current body of work focuses around the idea of ‘visitations’ – events that are ‘visited’ upon us beyond our control, and the physical / invisible after effects. In 1954 a meteorite crashed through the ceiling of Mrs. Ann Hodges’ home in Alabama and though she sustained only minor injuries her life was changed forever. Taking the meteorite as a signifier for ‘the end’ I am playing out different stories to present a set of unexpected outcomes. The opportunity to take part in the Geophilia residency fills me with excitement - to experience an epic landscape’s geology and react to it directly is a unique chance to develop my artistic practice.

 


zvonar

 

 

Elizabeth Zvonar, Canada
Channelling

I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the bedrock of which is predominately Amethyst. It was a strange and beautiful place to begin and sympathetic to creative youth. The Coast Mountains surrounding my home today in Vancouver are largely composed of Granite. In 2008, I spent a very transformative moment at the Banff Centre, the area composed largely of Limestone. I’m interested in geology and how it affects humans emotionally and creatively. Admittedly, I am an armchair enthusiast. I would love the opportunity to explore and work alongside seriously engaged geophiles who are open and willing to share their knowledge. In exchange, I can offer my novice insights and enthusiastic engagement.

My practice incorporates sculpture and collage while citing a diverse range of references from popular culture to historical events. Using humor and seduction made slightly strange as tools that draw a viewer in for closer contemplation, my work employs metaphor as a form of abstraction and as a way to talk about metaphysics through a feminine perspective. I am interested in using my work as a catalyst for thinking in a social and cultural climate where indifference has become de rigueur.

 

Biophilia Fall 2014

   

nursry


 

Regan Rosburg, USA
Detail of The Nursery paint,resin, natural materials

I aspire to re-establish intimacy with our inherent connection to the wildness of nature, while tapping into the frightening reality of a deteriorating, overly strained world. I seek to poignantly illustrate the injurious consequences ecological decline, but I do this by deeply rooting my artistic sensibility in an ecosystem’s ability to dominate any obstacle, to equalize what is not in balance.  My artwork is soaked in reverence, awe, and threat.  Thus, I ride a razor’s edge of harsh environmental concerns and spiritual musings, both of which are deeply based in my scientific and ecological research. 

 
            My materials of resin, detritus, organic remnants, plastic, sugar, gelatin, paint, and time-lapse photography address this subject through a lens of permanence/impermanence.  Most notably, I have developed a unique, complicated process of creating three-dimensional “sculptural paintings” out of objects, painted images, and resin.  One can see into each piece as if peering into a deep pool of water. Each piece can take a month to complete.  

 

e coli

 

Darya Warner, USA
Portrait of Escherichia Coli, 18” by 24"

My work revolves around the complexity of nature and global environmental consciousness. Through bio-processing and collaboration with living organisms (mycelium, bioluminescent algae, glowing E.Coli and other living matter) combined with usage of modern technologies (CNC machines) I create interactive installations, visual displays, and sculptures to engage the viewer into becoming more aware of the world around us and push to rethink their place as a  ‘sapiens’ part of Earth’s complex. 
My previous works include “Tribute to Edison “ - an interactive installation consisting of suspended lightbulbs filled with bioluminescent algae (founded in warm coastal waters) attached to the enlarged laser cutouts of the microscopic images of the algae as a single cell. The viewer is encouraged to touch the bulbs so the algae will react by producing the glow. The idea of biological control and substituting non-living material with living organisms  (ex. coal production for generation electricity) is replayed in this artwork.
One of my latest works is “ The Shape of Things to Come,” a set of living and growing mycelium sculptures. By manipulating the substrate necessary for mycelium (Reishi) to reproduce itself, my vision came alive as “newborns" (I used a mold of a baby doll head to establish the connection), which were inoculated with mushrooms spores. With the help of custom made incubators the mycelium (and other unexpected “neighbors") had spread taking over the shape of the sculpture. The process of growth is my driving force.

chantel dupas

 

 

Chantal Dupas, Canada

My work is rooted in a reflective interest in the cyclical and fragile nature of life. Through my studio practice and research, I have gravitated towards themes such as consumption, death and transformation in various capacities. Often, inspiration for bodies of work begins with analyses of certain experiences within natural environments, whether intentional or coincidental. I am motivated by the discovery of natural occurrences new to me and bring this sense of wonder and awe towards the mysteries of life into the studio, where I inevitably begin to question my affinities with and aversions to the world around us. My work has responded to phenomena in places ranging from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of Connecticut and to my own back yard. My most recent ventures have been delving into the world of botany, which stemmed from a residency at Riding Mountain National Park. Embracing my compulsion towards fact-based research and organization/categorization, I question whether these systems confront fears of mortality and perhaps are ways we deal with and control time. At the core of my practice, I am searching for experiences that remind me that I am within the natural systems I seek to gather information from.

 

 

Kristi Beisecker,USA
Fern, Kirlian Photography

In the Spring of 2012 I took a class in Alternative Photography as part of my degree in Graphic and Interactive Design. I am also into spirituality and as part of this interest I discovered Kirlian Photography or as I like to term it - Electrography. Kirlian Photography is made using high voltage electricity to expose objects on photo sensitive paper. In the realm of spirituality this photo process is said to capture the life force energy of organic materials, thus using it as a scientific process. Those who use the process look at it in a scientific mind frame and just photograph one object. Seeing its' potential as an art form, I took the process and reinvigorated it to be compatible with traditional darkroom processing. As this process was originally developed to use Polaroid film - which is expensive now - my college only had darkroom processing so I used the materials that were available to me. In the creation process, I applied my design skills of composition, relationships to elements on the page and how to arrange objects on a page where the energy flowed through the design. To me these photographs aren't just photograms but a cultivation of my entire knowledge as an artist.

 

jackie dorage

 

 

Jackie Dorage, USA
K-Pg Boundary Oil on Canvas 30 x 30 inch

My work combines factual substance and scientific research with creative narratives to enlighten viewers and emotionally mimic the thrill of scientific discovery. Through reading journals, articles, and books, and partnering with scientists and conservationists, I weave together a story that visually represents the research while allowing the mystery of the unknown to persist. Accompanying each piece is a short statement or quote, meant to give the audience insight into the research behind the work, allowing the viewer to feel a sense of discovery and knowledge gaining from a piece of art.
Everything we witness—a flock of birds or a beetle on a leaf—has a deeper, sometimes unseen function that is interconnected with the environment around it. Whether I'm exploring the increasing role of marine “pollutogens” spread by cats or the fantastical qualities of the K-Pg boundary acting as a bookmark in Earths geological history, my main goal is illustrating the complex, living realities and mysteries of our natural world.
Through combining hard science with fantastical art, I hope to send my viewers on a journey mimicking the arch and thrill of research and learning—intrigue, questioning, investigation, and, finally, discovery.

 

Biophilia July 2014

   

Susan

 

 

Susan Rochester, USA
The foolishness of the chase ached her heart, 20 x 16 inches, Archival pigment print

My work examines the borders existing between natural and artificial habitats. I am interested in the trails humans and animals carve out and follow as they travel through their respective environments. Invisible boundaries dictate how comfortable beings are as their paths of travel intersect routes created by others. Human development denies and obliterates natural trails and habitats, yet animals continue to prevail in the face of the destruction of ecosystems. I am also fascinated and baffled by the human response to the natural world. The eradication of predators (to prevent real and/or imagined threats) leads to an overabundance of prey animals, which are then deemed as nuisances. Solutions range from repellent sprays to issuing suburban hunting licenses--yet rarely is there a careful consideration of what could happen if we just let things be. In my most recent series Trespasses, I explore what might occur if human-animal boundaries were more fluid, even permeable. Animals seem more adaptable to human encroachment than humans are to animal presence. But what if humans were equally adaptable? What if more doors and windows were left open? How would animals adapt, and what would happen to the human environment?
I was granted generous access to the natural history collections of the Douglas County Museum of Cultural and Natural History for this project. The museum holds over 1,000 freeze-dried specimens of local fauna. The preservation process retains the skeletal structure of the animals, and there is a resulting life-like quality to many of them that is uncanny. My inspiration for the resulting images comes from the formalism of still life traditions, especially the combination of the living (or lifelike) with the dead, and the concept of memento mori. I find additional inspiration in the darker aspects of folk tales and stories in which animals are anthropomorphized.

 

Helga Jakobson, Canada

 

 

Flayed Frankenstein, Plasticized Hosta Leaves, Thread, Plant Matter, 2014

My work often incorporates detritus from my immediate atmosphere. Whether natural components of the Manitoba landscape or relics from my great grandparents’ homestead. I spend my time photographing and exploring the rural landscapes of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Iceland and elsewhere for inspiration. My travels have lead me to many derelict and abandoned buildings. Through visiting these places I feel that I have been able to gain a further understanding of spirituality and philosophy. I strive to focus on my personal experience as a springboard for exploration into ideas outside of my limited understanding. Through this process, I revel in attempting to create objects which quantify my own experiences. In my inevitable failure to do so, I feel as though I am able to express the space between ourselves and the outside world. Translating my inner landscape becomes an ambiguous representation of interiors which are occupied by all of us. Because of the specificity of my intent, the objects that I create are imbued with an aura of which I hope the viewer can explore and potentially find personal resonance with.
Currently, I am exploring the role of the feminine within science while endeavoring to express a less gendered perspective in understanding biology, inorganic/organic life, and evolution. My practice focuses on a hands-on approach to understanding scientific process as an access point into philosophical ideologies.

 

nat

 


Natalie Draz, Canada

Natalie Draz is an artist working across multiple disciplines of printmaking, installation and fibres to create environments of expereintial mapmaking, storytelling and transformation of bodies. Investigating the structures of books, maps and anatomical studies as a source of alternative documentation and storytelling, Natalie creates works transgress the boundaries of book and body. Accessed through visual narrative strategies of pop-up books, engaging installations, and intimate moments of discovery and transformation through personal micro-narratives and sketches. Instead, her sculptural works touch upon installations; experiential environments; fragmentary visual texts to be pieced together by each individual viewer. 

     
     
Biophilia August 2014
   

laura

 

 

Laura Grossett, USA
A Thin Barier, hand manipulated inkjet print on mylar, graphite. 11x8.5", 2013

I am attracted to ideas of preservation, absence and what it means to try and hold on to a thing or an idea as it slips away. This line of thought often leads me to thinking about endangered species and deforestation. In a very general sense, my work reflects an observation of the natural world.  I find forms and patterns that I respond to and that is where I begin. I often draw from specimens.  I used to work in a specimen collection library where I cataloged bird skins. I still find it peculiar to be in the presence of one of these static mimicries.  The feeling is especially poignant the individual is from an extinct or endangered species. Did did we assist in their depopulation in this one small way?  Maybe it will be in the interest of the greater good, sometimes the scientific data those skins provide help us manage current wildlife populations more effectively.  Well, we were able to save at least one.... sort of.  But, irony aside, it is a beautiful sort of honor- this preservation of a life.  When I worked in the collection room we spent time carefully organizing, labeling and tending to the bird mummies.  In some ways it was reminiscent of human burial traditions where the body is embalmed after death (although, in the case of bird skins, they were usually killed for the sole purpose of scientific study).  For awhile I made little bird skins out of metal and plastic: tiny forms that would last forever- even longer than the century-old specimens that inspired them.  After this I started another series where I cut similar shapes from sheet metal and embossed them into paper using an etching press.  To me these were symbolic of voids- they were the literal impressions left behind after death.  

 

Sarah fagan

 

 

Sarah Fagan, USA
Sustain, acrylic on paper, 21" x 16"

In a blend of painterly strokes and trompe l'oeil, I paint everyday objects in the medium of acrylic on panel. Like the vanitas painters of the Dutch Baroque, quotidian objects become symbols for something more. I offer not solely a reflection on mortality, but human psychology. Turning my back on the point of view typically employed by still life painters, I present my subjects from a direct aerial perspective, sans environment. The resulting visual immediacy forces confrontation between object and viewer. Accordingly, I consider the sensual and visual, as well as cerebral, impacts the chosen objects may deliver. I choose objects with a visceral draw: objects meant to be touched or used. As someone with synesthesia, wherein senses cross, I find this tactile impetus as natural for me as it is meaningful to the viewer. The concept of the hand is of import. Craftsmen tools, utensils, writing implements, and found natural objects engage the hand and, and thus the body, through the eye. These are "active" objects. As a foil to active objects is the "empty" object: the object of potential. Empty articles of clothing, blank sheets of paper, and smooth stones are vessels into which viewers may project their own emotions, tensions, completions, and gut reactions. These projections are the impetus of my work. The viewer takes on an active role not only by bringing her own connotations, memories, and histories to the objects themselves, but by unconsciously delving into her individual psychology when imagining narrative or meaning in composition. By visually grouping, pairing, and categorizing objects, I use the gesture of science without the technicality. I use a language that invites meaning without explanation. I orchestrate compositions with the recognition that symmetry and aestheticism invite contemplation. These qualities both draw in the eye and, in their artifice, allow the viewer to enter a world beyond the object. By deliberately  pairing objects with one another, cropped landscapes, and fields of color, the concept of narrative and meaning emerge, even though meaning itself may be veiled. What is of import is not the meaning I impose, but the need for the collective consciousness to find meaning in pattern, to see didacticism in arrangements. Likewise, it is not the unknown narrative that matters, but the human mind's necessity to make one. I place this onus on the viewer, as the most profound meanings come from within. Sartre famously explained this need with the phrase "existence precedes essence." As an artist, I search for pattern and meaning in the natural world, or study the framework of systems, charts, and graphs created by man. As various minds arrange systems and graft meaning on objects, interpretations are infinite.

 

 

Sophie Lindsey, England
Grass Work, 2013

As my work stems from observations, I predominantly make work about the everyday and art itself. However, I have a keen interest in the natural environment and enjoyed studying physical geography in education. This led me to partake in a placement in the Geology department at the University of Brighton. While I was able to create work throughout this, the main focus of my placement was comparing the similarities between art and geology. This led to Cross-Curricular: Art and Geology, a project which introduced geological samples into an art environment and land art into a geology lecture. However, as this placement was within a teaching framework the work was heavily informed by the way in which both disciplines were taught.
I am particularly interested in our relationship as humans to the natural world, and how we have progressed far beyond our natural state. Human manipulation of the environment is something I have briefly explored on my previous placement, and I am interested to see whether this is such a strong feature in  Canada, as it is very prevalent in UK.In considering these aspects combined with the approach I take in my practice, I anticipate creating something intervention based, potentially highlighting the bizarre conventions with have applied to life as a way to distance ourselves from the environment. However, the experience of Biophilia will undoubtedly shape what I make during and after the residency, and this may cause me to produce something I am unable to anticipate.

   
AiR Currents August 2014

   

 

 

Rahni Allan, Tazmania
Arsetronaught Training Handbook

For as long as we have been looking up we have also looked within. My practice employs perhaps the most influential human narrative; the love story in order to resonate the complex and emotive forces inherent in science and discovery with the individual. I am inspired by quantum physics and the existential and scientific conundrums that can deduce macrocosmic conundrums to tangible microcosmic materials present in everyday reality.
My practice is inspired to find a moment of synthesis between the apparent extremities pertaining to self and universe, by pitting myself and my love against scientific conundrums such as gravity, space, time and a demonstrable objective resolution. Gravity has throughout human history been a powerful metaphor for freedom, to break free of gravity has been for generations, a symbolic gesture embroiled with hope, wonder and peace. My practice offers an opportunity to look up and within to experience moments like the thousands of explorers, scientists, philosophers and artists throughout history have looked to the skies for answers. I too am overcome with the awe and wonder of living in a time in human history in which complex and impossible notions traditionally belonging toscience can be explained via artful media.

 

Elena Thomas, USA

 

 

Consideration, 2014

Art is an experience. It can wrap you up in another world or show you something about your own that you never knew. Since I was young, art has been equal parts captivating and freeing. Initially, art was an emotional release for me. It was spontaneous and compulsive. And in many ways it still is, but instead of rushing to the nearest canvas, now I write or sketch whatever image or idea has invaded my mind and refuses to leave. Certain things continue to fascinate me or pull at me, and demand to be expressed: With an unending interest in the way that light functions, I fill my camera with pictures of shadows and reflections. Wishing that people could see or understand certain truths, my pieces are an attempt to share things that may be difficult or unavailable to them, like just how many children get cancer, or how, even if they survive, like me, they could still face a number of medical issues. Exploring the edges of art and function, but always leaning more toward art, I have created lights, tables, chairs, and climbable sculptures. Spatial consideration, think about how a piece interacts with
the space in which it is placed, and how the viewer fits in with the piece and the space, is my most recent obsession, which played a part in creating two climbable sculptures, and an art piece installed over a staircase so that people experience it as they walk up or down. I want to change the notions held by the viewer of what their relationship is to the space and to the piece, and challenge the way that the audience sees the relationship between the space and the piece.

 

 

 

Cara Cole, Canada
Every Living Thing

I am interested in the impact of time on both earthbound and celestial bodies.  Time devastates flesh and rapidly consumes it. So, we humans and beasts have a finite arc of time--a brief interval between birth and death--in contrast to the relative eternity of the cosmos.
In performing dissections on dead beasts for this series, in peering intently at their viscera,  I am struck by the grace and mystery inherent in the folds of brilliantly hued flesh, and fur and bone. This internal landscape is one of fearsome poetry. It echoes the immense and distant universe, a luminous arc of fur in darkness resembles a  solar flare. Folds of flesh  glow and stream like remote star fields.
I must admit I do not observe this phenomena neutrally. I wish I could do more then simply dissect and expose the interior space, that secret rich place where memory and desire--a life--dwelled. I examine these interiors and wish I could perform my own miracles upon the flesh. I wish I could  reverse the tide of time and bring the dead back to life: to make blood rush into the body instead of out, to inflate collapsed lungs with fresh breath, to seal gaping wounds neat and invisible like they were never there at all.