We look forward to learning with the following artists in 2024 |
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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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.
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Michelle Bunton 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. |
Crystal Crow, Rosemère, Quebec |
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 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.
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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. |
Katie Hart Potapoff, Dundee, Scotland |
Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN 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 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. |
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. |
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. |
Samantha Schwartz 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 |
2023 |
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. |
Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant 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. |
Katie Hart Potapoff, Dundee, Scotland |
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.
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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. 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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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. |
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.
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2022 |
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. |
Jay Davani, Providence, Rhode Island I am a death-curious artist exploring how to use my creative |
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. |
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. |
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 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. |
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
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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. |
September 2022 |
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. |
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 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. 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 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. |
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. |
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.
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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. |
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 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, By playing with scale and proportions Smets is repositioning the viewer as the smallest entity |
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. |
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. 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 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. |
August 2022 |
Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant 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. |
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. |
Isabel Winson-Sagan, |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
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 |
Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant 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. |
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 |
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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 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. |
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. |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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.”
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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. |
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.
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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. |
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.
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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. |
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. |
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. |
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 |
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.
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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
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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. |
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. |
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. |
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,
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Alyssa Ellis, 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. |
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.
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Mirinda Davies, Miami, Australia
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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.
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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. |
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 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.
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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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2021 |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 Jamieson-Hanes, Kingston, Ontario My mind is consumed by being surrounded by death, particularly the deaths of those deemed less important. |
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 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 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 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
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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. |
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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 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 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. |
Laura Ahola, Pocatello, ID I pay close attention to the world around me, from politics to science, so that I am not only
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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. |
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.
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Camille Kravitzch, Basel, Switzerland |
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. |
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. |
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.
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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 |
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. |
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. |
Emma Pallay, Montreal |
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. |
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 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. |
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. |
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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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 |
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 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. |
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. |
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. |
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.
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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. |
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 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.
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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 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 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.
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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, 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. |
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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 Ahola, Pocatello, ID I pay close attention to the world around me, from politics to science, so that I am not only
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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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Isabel Winson-Sagan,
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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. |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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.
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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.
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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. |
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.
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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. |
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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. |
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, 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 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? |
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.
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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. |
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. |
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.
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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.
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Sophie Rogers, London |
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.
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Alison 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. |
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. |
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.
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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.
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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. |
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. |
Isabel Winson-Sagan, 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. |
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 |
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. |
Michael Pissano, Pittsburgh, PA 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. |
Dawn George, Hammonds Plains, 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. |
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. |
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, 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. |
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. |
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. |
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, |
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. |
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.
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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. |
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 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. |
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, 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Melanie Long, Calgary, AB My artwork answers the questions that I want to ask the world. My practice is an ongoing |
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, 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. |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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 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. |
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 George, Hammonds Plains, 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. |
Twyla Nova, Duncanville, Texas My artwork incorporates various photographic processes. Although each series explores a |
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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.
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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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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 |
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In my work I investigate ways to create physical representations of human mentality and |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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Margaret Haydon, Wyoming |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Shelly Smith, Expedition Leader 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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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.
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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.
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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 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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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. |
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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
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Michelle Bunton, Expedition Leader 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? |
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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 ? |
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Kelly Markovich, Dartmouth, NSKelly Markovich is an interdisciplinary artist, interested in photography, sound, textiles, installation and mixed media. |
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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. |
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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.
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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 |
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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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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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 . |
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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. |
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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.
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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 |
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Raimundo Nenen, Chile After the publication of my first book of poetry at age 16, I crossed out my authorship |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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, |
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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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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? |
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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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I am interested in nature, in its constant changing quality, the circle of life and death. |
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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. 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.
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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 |
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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.
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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 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.
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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 |
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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.
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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 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… |
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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! |
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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. |
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Tanya Chaly, NYC In my work I have been pursuing a number of projects with Natural History |
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Kate Houlne, Indiana Invisible Threads |
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2017 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Expedition leader “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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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. |
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Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Syracuse NY |
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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. |
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Melissa Smith, NC |
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Rhonda Vanover, NY
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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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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Botany for artists GERMINATE July 2017 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Guylaine Couture, Montreal |
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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.
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Mellissa Fisher, UK 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. |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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Insects and entomology for artists
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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. |
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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. |
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Cynthia O’Brien, Ontario I have two bodies of work at the moment, that are opposite yet connected. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Expedition Leader: 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.
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WHITE WAGTAIL Its tail incessantly flails Not at all deterred, it rails With such finesse, it scales Such an inspiration as it sails Under such conditions, it still nails In winter, its pied plumage pales . |
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.” |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Bioacoustics for artists BIOPHONY May 2017 |
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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. Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books, Random House Inc, New York p172
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Natasha Lushetich, Singapore |
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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. |
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Leap Second |
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And sometimes, mysteriously, |
Love Poem Explosion
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Vestiges |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Biophilia September 2016 |
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Heather Layton
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Quench |
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Krista Hoeppner Leahy, NYC 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. |
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Shu-Ju Wang, Portland
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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. |
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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.
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Women on the Wing |
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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.
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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.
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Tina Havlock Stevens, Australia | ||||
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Creep July 2016 |
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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. |
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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 |
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Melinda Hurst Frye
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.
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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. |
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Biophilia: Nocturne |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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Biophilia: Peep, Croak, Growl |
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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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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. |
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Koizora, Fall 2015 |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Samwell Freeman 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. |
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Biophilia, Fall 2015 |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Adrian E. Rivera, NYC 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.
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Biophilia, Summer 2015 |
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Anika Schneider, USA
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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.
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Marjorie Lemay, Montreal
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William Scully, USA 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.
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John Deamond, USA
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Geophilia, Summer 2015 |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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Koizora, Spring 2015 |
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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.
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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? |
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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.
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Biophilia Spring 2015 |
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Marynes Avila, Australia
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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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Michelle Wilson, Canada
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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. |
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Nicole Edmond, Canada 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.
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Carol Howard Donati, Canada |
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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. |
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Below Zero Winter 2015 |
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Charlotte Smith, England
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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.
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Nicole Valentine Rimmer, BC, Canada 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.
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Geophilia Fall 2014 |
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Anna Carr Kodama, USA 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. |
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Gabrielle Giordano, USA 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. |
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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. |
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Alyson O'Malley, New Zealand |
Up in the Air Somewhere, Flipping White Pages with out Poems |
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Sarah Gillett, England
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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.
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Elizabeth Zvonar, Canada
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Biophilia Fall 2014 |
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Regan Rosburg, USA 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.
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Darya Warner, USA |
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Chantal Dupas, Canada
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Kristi Beisecker,USA
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Jackie Dorage, USA 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.
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Biophilia July 2014 |
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Susan Rochester, USA
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Flayed Frankenstein, Plasticized Hosta Leaves, Thread, Plant Matter, 2014 |
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Biophilia August 2014 |
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Laura Grossett, USA
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Sarah Fagan, USA
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Sophie Lindsey, England |
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AiR Currents August 2014 |
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Rahni Allan, Tazmania
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Elena Thomas, USA
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Consideration, 2014
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Cara Cole, Canada |