Our research programs have evolved over the years to facilitate more and more specialized study. Biophilia was once the name of our general biology and naturalism course that featured our favorite topics and science communicators. When our name changed from the Ayatana Artists' Research Program, we changed the Biophilia course to Symbiosis, a general biology interest course that highlighted the conections between species. Instead of a talk on butterflies, we host a talk on the relationship between Monarchs and Milk Weed. Instead of a talk on seaweed, we have a talk on the ecology of Kelp forests and keystone species. This focus naturally lead to Dysbiosis, a course on invasive species, which naturally evolved into Rewild, a course on practical conservation and ecological philosophy. The most recent iteration was Species, a program on evolution and genetics. You can find all the artists who have participated in these courses here.

We have had the pleasure of studying ecology and conservationwith the following artists

Click on images to see more about each artist.

Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

Alexis Williams is a spore spreader, silk moth protector and the director of the Biophilium. She specializes in the liminal spaces between forest and field. As an eco art teacher inspired by research biologists and ecologists, she is devoted to directing the attention of her students to the intricacies of ecology through wildlife appreciation in an attempt to develop ways to describe and celebrate the value of life. Her courses shed light on the boundaries between wild and domestic to show that there is none and aim to encourage people to notice their roles in ecology.

Alexis is an enthusiastic believer in the Symbioscene, the epoch after the Anthropocene, when humans develop practices to cohabitate the Earth and to live in reciprocity with all non-human life. She believes that humans are hyperkeystone species. We influence every habitat, ecosystem, species and have the ability to initiate complex cascading eccological interactions. That this achievement will grant us both the privilege and the responsibility to design and maintain Earth’s ecosystems, and therefore climates, intentionally. And so, we must develop a goal, agree on a set of values, plan the world we want to express, and then bring it to life. We are in a time of frightening dissonance, when our cultural practices contradict our values, but a growing appreciation for the complexities of ecology and a clear human desire for clean air & water and policies that support biodiversity is emerging and our behaviors are following. Alexis’s ecological optimism does not deny the urgency of conservation, but is a call to action.

Suus Agnes Claessen, Holland
Biophilum research leader

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

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

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

Diana S. Fox, Parker, Colorado, USA

My art reflects my lifelong fascination with fibers and textiles, which are characterized by their rich texture and tactile qualities. Working with fabric creates an intriguing intimacy, and I relish the feel of the material flowing through my hands.

In my current series of work, “Gifts from the Universe," I explore the complex connections between humans and the natural world. I view my artistic practice as a source of inspiration from spirit, bridging the seen and unseen aspects of nature. I often develop my ideas through collage and drawing, then bring them to life using a unique, self-developed technique.

Practically, my work embodies the primary elements of art: color, line, shape, and more. As a dyer and surface designer, I achieve the effects I desire through a combination of techniques, including flat dyeing, monoprinting, and tie-dyeing. An added benefit of working with fiber is the incorporation of texture through stitching, which serves as a final, added element. I consider myself a “quiet” activist for our planet, inviting others to nurture a conscious relationship with our ecosystem. My daily motivations are radical blind trust and the continual question, “What if?”

Catherine Euale, Canada, Mexico

Catherine Euale is a textile artist, social justice and environmental activist, costume designer and storyteller. In her practice, she challenges the need to use materials and methods that are noncompatible with living systems. She believes deepening and shifting our relationships with the material can raise awareness of our forgotten relationships within more than human worlds, planting seeds for a “good Anthropocene”. Designing systems for interspecies worlds can ignite tremendous political, social, and philosophical implications that we must consider for a resilient and harmonious future.

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein, Cambridge, MA, USA

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein is an internationally-renowned artist and educator. Her studio, the "Edible Nest Studio" (founded 2021) works to create whole systems and integrated circular approaches to the practice of both design and culinary fields. The studio includes an urban garden, test kitchen, materials innovation practice, continual research in nature-based-solutions and diversified global approaches, and a monthly environmental art column with EcoArtSpace. With over a decade of experience as a designer, writer, and educator, she has actively promoted resiliency practices through visual art, performance, participatory education, and a vertically integrated practice. Expanding traditional ‘sustainability’ to highlight social and economic factors as well as novel and innovative material solutions and methods, Olivia’s work exists in an expanding “whole-systems” framework where social justice, equity, and critical material histories stand at the forefront promoting representation and reparation. Working in a range of media including digital media, the written word, illustration, textiles and fashion, food, as well as theater and performance art, she thoughtfully expands her practice as a “knowledgeable novice”, ever-learning and curious, emphasizing collaboration and communication. 

Megan Elevado, Brooklyn, NY, USA

As a mixed-race person, I’ve spent too much time searching for ways to belong, feel part of something. My artistic practice seeks human connection beyond the binary of
inclusion/exclusion and cultivates relations with nature and the spiritual realm. I am curious about what stirs humans on the instinctual, animalistic level. When all socialized pretense is put aside, what (visual, sound, smell, tactility) incites a genuine reaction, from joy to fear to discomfort to affection? I explore what resonates with viewers visually and viscerally through ceramics, illustration, and multi-media installation.
My practice balances creation and research. As a historian, I am compelled to understand objects and images within their social, political, and economic contexts, and dig into the deeper significance behind the choices of visual creators. Better understanding these choices and expressions within various contexts allows me to see what narratives, symbolism, imagery, colors, textures, and volumes continue to stimulate humans through the ages.

Most of my work is of creatures, real and imagined, who serve as avatars, facilitators, and guides. I imagine a less human-centric world. In the end, we rely on nature, its power and its mercy, to take care of us. Currently, I’m focusing on what we can learn from animals and how they can help us remember forgotten skills: how to cultivate and thrive in community, how to sustainably complement and support our environment, and how to drop our learned, limiting social barriers and be a little more wild.

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

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

Isabel Winson-Sagan is an interdisciplinary artist, often collaborating with her mother Miriam Sagan. Santa Fe based artists, they combine text & the graphic arts in all of their work. To view their portfolio, please visitl Maternal Mitochondria. On her own, Isabel works in a variety of mediums, including installation, printmaking/book arts, photography, and new media.

Instructor: Alexis Williams
Director of the Biophilium,
Ottawa, Canada

Alexis Williams is a wildlife interpreter, drawer, writer and the director of the Biophilium. Fascinated by the mechanics of evolution, Alexis fixates on how the traits of each species expand to fill the spaces available, inflating niches with the electrochemistry of life, following paths of opportunity and circumnavigating obstacles. Sometimes they rejoin themselves on the other side, perhaps millions of years later. Sometimes they recognise themselves, but often they have changed so much on their way around that they have forgotten all familiar alegences. The tree of life splits and merges the same way mycelium does or the way ink blooms and follows a lattice of sea water on Alexis’ page.

Just as organisms evolve, transforming from one ancestral identity into entirely new descendant organisms (There are bacteria for example chaotically performing the equivalent amount of evolution as our entire human existential history every few days.) the more we learn about individual species, how they thrive and behavel, the more we see them in concert with each other rather than in competition with each other. Taxonomy, science’s method for defining, categorizing and illustrating the genetic relationships between species, is a relatively new idea and despite it’s definitive nature, is subject to constant paradigm shifts. Distinctions between species refuse to be still because the whole system- both the living ecological one, and the living scientific doctrine is constantly transforming like a giant 3 dimentinal living Janga game where individuals and species are the pieces that are pulled out from under each other and are built atop each other as they fall. There is no balanced ecosystem, no harmony in life or ecology, but a constant cacophony as we all struggle to survive, thrive and understand.

Frustration with the limits and the ambiguities of the English language as it fails to express the elegant mechanisms of evolution drives Alexis to speculate on the transformative nature of life.

TA: Shelly Smith,
Biophilium Research Leader
Seattle, WA

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.

Catherine Slilaty, Montreal, QC

Stemming from a desire to explore the self as an organism of flux, my work explores the lives of speculative creatures able to transform themselves to adapt to their environment. Inspired by microorganisms, plant life, and the interior structures of organic life, I use monsters and creatures as portals to access parts of ourselves which are intrinsically linked to nature: a site where curiosity, wonder, anguish, and survival instincts collide. As a queer, neurodivergent second-generation immigrant, many aspects of my identity fall into the in-between. I’ve always been drawn to the monster in all forms of media: the othered hybrid, the outcast creature unable to be anything but its unapologetic self, undeniably powerful and free, existing outside of social conventions. I found freedom and healing through the ways monsters have always tended to embrace dread and desire head-on, through radical self-making and resilience. I see these beings as vessels for Othered bodies, allowing access to catharsis by embracing transformation: an ever-evolving, fluid and full self. My current work is focused on the evolutionary jump between the inert and the living: how the organization of matter forming organic life came to be. I’m seeking to blend the latest scientific findings on these topics with a playful speculative approach through animation and drawing.

Rebecca Krinke, White Bear Lake, MN

I have a hybrid life as a visual artist and professor of landscape architecture; these two threads in my work have recently been reaching a new symbiosis. “Earthling School” is the conceptual umbrella that has emerged for my creative practice, research, and teaching which focuses on the Earth, the cosmos, the human and nonhuman world (including NHI) and deepening all relationships between - including those with each other.

Three initiatives were key to developing Earthling School:
1) personal and collaborative work with two biological field stations,
2) a long collaboration with Indigenous and Settler colleagues with the latest being the Two Eyed Seeing and Third Spaces group I convene. (“Two-Eyed Seeing” means to see with the lens of Indigenous and Western science at the same time, for the benefit of all.)
3) my visual art that emerged from a powerful dream I had as an adult. I interpreted the origin dream as a bear that visited. Since then, I have had three sequential dreams with animals: a frog/tadpole, raptor, and octopus that I have explored in my installations. I also draw upon my many anomalous experiences to create places to share with others in which intuition, psychic events, and dreams are brought forth as powerful ways of learning and knowing.

Catherine Euale, Canada, Mexico

Catherine Euale is a textile artist, social justice and environmental activist, costume designer and storyteller. In her practice, she challenges the need to use materials and methods that are noncompatible with living systems. She believes deepening and shifting our relationships with the material can raise awareness of our forgotten relationships within more than human worlds, planting seeds for a “good Anthropocene”. Designing systems for interspecies worlds can ignite tremendous political, social, and philosophical implications that we must consider for a resilient and harmonious future.

Luci Jockel, Baltimore, MD

I make mementos from responsibly-sourced animal remains to honor and grieve the loss of our nonhuman counterparts. Similar to historic mourning ritualistic objects and relics, I explore the agency of remains and wearables to carry memories of past lives and relationships. The tangibility allows us to remain connected to those beyond, preserve their stories and reflect on their lives.

Using materials, such as animal remains, stone and metal, the artist and viewer become physically tied to their surroundings and asked to remember their dependence on the earth. By investigating the quiet intersections between unearthed materials, I attempt to understand the bigger story- the web connecting all beings. My work questions the hierarchical systems of value created around materials and beings, of which we share a common resting ground.

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

Samah Husain, Manama, Bahrain

Ever since I was diagnosed 5 years ago, I started planting in an attempt to understand how tumors grow. Maybe if I learn how they grow, I can figure out how to stop them from growing, or even make them shrink and disappear. With every plant, I learned something new. Then my grandma passed away, followed shortly by my uncle. I had to make sense of it all, so I prepared a funeral, learned how the body is washed and wrapped according to our religion (Islam), and then buried. Dust to dust. We return to the soil. That soil, fertilized by the decomposition of the dead body, grows flowers and plants.

When I die, what will my soil grow? What plant will emerge from my body? This question keeps me up at night.

Ishan Khosla, Dehradun, India

Gina Sun, Ithica NY

As a cross-media designer and artist, I integrate academic rigor with innovative creativity, exploring the intersections of Art, Design, and Intelligence within the framework of Human Ecology. My research focuses on sensory experiences—particularly olfactory, tactile, and gustatory modalities—and investigates how humans, machines, and spatial environments interact in the digital age. My interdisciplinary practice spans Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Information Experience Design, Sensory Design, Media Art Installations, Kansei Engineering, and Cognitive Psychology. Through this multifaceted approach, I examine how technology shapes and mediates our sensory engagement with the world around us.

Currently, I am a Visiting Scholar at the DALI Lab, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, where I continue to explore Intelligence and Environmental Analysis. My work has been published in leading international conferences and SCI-indexed journals, reflecting my commitment to high-impact research. As an active member of the Asian Digital Art and Design Association, the China Graphic and Image Society, and the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society, I contribute to advancing interdisciplinary dialogues that bridge technology, design, and human experience in contemporary practice.

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Abma, Bright's Grove, Ontario
Biophilium Teacher's Assistant

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

 Laura Ahola, Pocatello, ID

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

Michelle Bunton
Ontario, Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francine 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.

Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

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

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

Eric Millikin, Richmond, VA

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

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

Fenna 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.

Alyssa Roggow, Great Falls, Montana

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

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

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.

Alison Neville

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.

Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Hyde Park, MA

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.

Kate Houlne, Indiana

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

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

Pam Lostracco, Toronto

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

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

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

Natasha 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.

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

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

Tiffany Deater, Fulton, NY

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

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

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

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.

Michael Pissano, Pittsburgh, PA
Expedition leader

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

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

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

Dawn George, Hammonds Plains,
Nova Scotia

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

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

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

Amanda McKenzie, Edmonton, AB

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

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

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

Bohie Palecek, Braidwood, NSW Australia

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

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

Mary Abma, Bright’s Grove, ON

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

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

Rachel Kavathe, Columbus, IN

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

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

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

Doris Lamontagne, Ottawa, Canada

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

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

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

Sophy Tuttle, Lowell, MA

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

Amanda Thackray, Newark, NJ

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

Claire Fleming Staples, Oakland CA

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

2019

Field Expeditions

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.

Katie St Clair

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

Melanie Fisher, Buffalo, NY

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

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

Dani Dale, Saskatoon, SK

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

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

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

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

Markus Haala, Lowell, MA

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

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

2018
Field Expeditions

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.

Mika Aono, Eugene, OR

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

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

Christine Holtz, Pitttsburgh

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

Melissa Robertson, Ontario

Angela Dieffenbach, Chicago

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

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.

2017

Field Expeditions

Expedition leader
Alyssa Ellis, Canada
The Laboratory of Toxic Materials

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

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

Michelle Bunton, Canada

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

Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Syracuse NY

There is this extraterrestrial thing that occurs between a visual experience and its cognitive translation. The experience of looking has a visceral relationship with the psyche. The sight of a worm dying in the sun can contain a sort of joyful aesthetic satisfaction, along with the everyday mundanity of such an occurrence, all the way down the spectrum to the very tragedy of the mortality of living beings.

The images that I have shown are from a group I’m working on called The Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones. This project integrates disparate imagery, from highly stylized documents, photographs, videos of dissections, and sourced diagrams from scientific educational materials. The work deals with the relationship that sight and imagination has with knowing, specifically in aspects of science that are heavily associated with an objective and visually clinical idea of knowledge. I am complicating that with a more poetic conception of scientific phenomena.
With a history of attempts to grasp a conception of Being that encompasses the vast network of biological life and death, from Aristotle’s attempts to address the different kinds of souls possessed by living things in De Anima (On the Soul) in 350 BCE, to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein or fundamental presence in his major 20th century treatise Being and Time, there is still an abundance of wonder within the knowns and unknowns of the network of interactions in the world that my work addresses.

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.

Melissa Smith, NC

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

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

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

Rhonda Vanover, NY

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

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

Brooke 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. 

Biophilia
September 2016

Field Expeditiona

Heather Layton

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

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.

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.

Christine Moss, Woodstock, NY

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

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

Cameron Dueck, Hong Kong

Cameron Dueck is a writer, adventurer and filmmaker. His first book, iPad app and documentary film to 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.

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.

Karolina Żyniewicz, Poland

 The core of my interest is the balance between nature and culture, as represented through visual arts. Nature provides me with a setting or environment to examine area aesthetics. Having abandoned the making of representational work, I developed my preference for objects and installations that require interaction. Art, to my mind, should be an investigation similar to science. The most important aspect is the process. The piece of art or exhibition exists for some time and then disappears, as do all living things. It is about asking questions, researching and seeking adventure. A major factor in my work is curiosity. I am interested in all aspects of the natural world and while I can't know or learn everything, art allows me to use every area of knowledge without specialisation. It is a place for making relationships between different layers of thinking. I value and appreciate cooperation with people, the transfer of knowledge and sharing experiences. This was the motivation of my recent collaborations with Departments of Education in both the Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery Zachęta in Warsaw.

Maria Dmitruk, Poland

I am a multimedia artist, whose projects focus on involving audience – I’m very interested in all kinds of interactive projects. My means of expression on one hand include installations open to a dialogue with space and on the other hand, objects – sometimes small – which focus  on details, structures and textures showing the unity in diversity among organic forms. Natural sciences have always been a great passion of mine. As I progress along my artistic path, I become more and more aware of the importance of ecological issues. I try to avoid synthetic materials – it is a gesture of respect for the Earth and its produce. Besides, I think no other substance is as noble, as the one coming directly from the nature itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
I have developed a number of projects using soil; recently I turned to bio-art in its more precise meaning. At the moment, I’m working on my PhD project, which concerns plant physiology; specifically speaking – the phenomenon of etiolation. The darkness, I’m dealing with, is a natural condition, permanently present in most of the Universe. Darkness on our privileged planet, which is natural, seems to be conceptualised as an instance of absence –  an absence of light, which influences vegetation in nature and influences human mind. Darkness represents both existential anxiety and concern about the future of natural environment.                
Projects, which I develop, require a lot of meticulous work and of an interdisciplinary co-operation with scientists and technology experts – it’s not the number of projects that matters to me, but their meaningfulness. This style of work makes me concentrate on the process of creation and I find  it important to share it with others.   I believe that an intellectual community of like-minded people, who are at the same time individuals coming from different backgrounds can benefit with a significant  and universal change.    

Adrian E. Rivera, NYC

Technology exists only in the presence of living beings. In the same way those beings are formed by nature around them. My work is derived from a source object or concept, the structures grow and deform in response to it’s surroundings. As new structures are formed pre-existing ones may shift and bend in the wake of new matter. As I imitate aspects of the natural world I wish to provide organisms the ability to take forms not seen before by removing control and allowing living matter to grow onto the structures I have created. In doing so the remains of previous beings are consumed and integrated in a new whole. 

My work is often dependent on a self imposed limit of time; this creates a sense of urgency which allows me to create intuitively. This fluid workflow translates to the final piece. My materials include things such as 3D printed plastic, animal bones, mycelium, moss and other plants.

Anika Schneider, USA

Our society has a poor history with environmental stewardship. One of the cultural ideas we need to wrestle with in today’s environmental crisis is whether we are a part of nature or apart from nature. As the media plays such a significant role in our society in shaping our ideas and opinions, I scoured news stories to better understand how the media presents the natural world. In these news stories, I discovered themes of struggle between humans and the environments in which we live. From stories of combatting floods, forest fires, tides, etc., humans were presented as not living with nature but rather battling it and attempting to keep natural forces at bay. In my paintings, I pair contrasting painting techniques of thin drippy glazes and thick brush strokes to depict this tension between man and nature. My paintings have an aura of mystery, which is created through unclear subject matter and a layering of paint to capture how unsettled and vulnerable humans feel when constantly battling their environment, instead of living with it. As I worked with news stories, I began to place landscapes from my life and my own self into the paintings to question my own place in the natural world.

Marjorie Lemay, Montreal
In the last 15 years, through drawing, painting, etching and photography, and in a desire to capture its essence, I developed a hybrid visual language that enables me to project myself into the Animal and unveil my singular imagination. As an artist, I continuously strive to renew my creativity and explore new ways to harness matter and refine my graphic language. My work tends to adopt a narrative shape and experimental film (especially animation) appears to me as a way to orchestrate my visual language with a new sound dimension. My work has been presented in thirty events and group exhibits, particularly at the 2005 Junction Arts Festival in Toronto, the Joyce Yahouda Gallery in 2004 and at the 2004 Photomahon (Montréal/Guadalajara edition). My last exhibition, Ursus Maritimus,was presented at Maison de la culture Frontenac de Montréal in February 2008.
My animation films Les Nocturnes and Auscultation of the Heart produced at Mel hoppenheim School of Cinema in 2010-2012 received significant recognition and acclaim in many important national and international film festivals.
Since 2012, I am a new mom and I have the chance to experience working as an educator and a teacher assistant in different contexts and schools with adults, teens and children. I feel that it nourishes my art practice a lot and help me understand more about collaborative works. I am also currently collaborating with a theater group (Le Théâtre du Cerisier) creating animated sequences for a puppets show that will be shown to teenagers in 2015-16.
As an MFA student in Film Production since September 2014, I am exploring different cinematic approaches to celebrate nonhuman life forms, Sanctuaries and wildlife preservation. In a continual quest for finding ways to engage the spectator in a dialogue with Nature, I am really excited to participate to residencies like yours that celebrate Art and Science and Nature. I have just finish writing a paper about Nature and Sound Art and I would like to experiment more in that field.

William Scully, USA
Nature is the inspiration for my photographic work and I enjoy seeking out and probing into overlooked microcosms within the natural world. With an approach to art that is both exploratory and methodical, I look for gesture in nature by wandering natural realms with my camera and sampling the many variations in light and atmosphere that change with time and season and weather. The sensual quality of my artwork reflects the physicality connecting me to the environment as I photograph. Engaging nature in this way, I explore the landscape and embed the experience in my art.

My educational background in engineering and actuarial science has given me a studious approach to art, and the results of my photography often lead me to more in-depth research on my subjects. Recently I have been studying lithographic printing techniques for reproducing my work. Full of many variables, lithography involves a complex craftsmanship that I find appealing to both the artistic and the analytical aspects of my personality. This intertwining of exploration and learning through art is what I find most compelling about being an artist. 

John Deamond, USA
My work explores the border of the human and the natural through processes often on the borders of photography. Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) builds a process that captures the spirit of a place through its leavings: those parts cast on the ground to decompose or grow into new plants. These two types of leavings are the summation of the natural processes of a place; the beginning and end of life cycles occur side by side and feed one another, entropic and organizing processes work together to build a biological community. Like all of my recent work, I consider these pieces to be environmental portraits: ways of telling nature’s personal story, whether it be of Nova Scotia, the Chesapeake Bay, or even contemporary attitudes toward extinction. A Field Guide to the Extinct and Extirpated Birds of North America takes on the latter. Through a book and collection, this work guides visitors through my investigations of extinct North American birds. It juxtaposes images and data from natural history institutions and eBay with traditional field guide pages to tell the continuing story of these birds; how, despite using them until they were gone, we continue to find new uses. 

Marynes Avila, Australia
The Public Narratives of Multiples: A Language of Transcendence

Marynes Avila is an Argentinean born Melbourne artist who implements the use of multiples as “data connectors” by investigating the uniqueness of each unit and its interrelationship with the group. Involving overwhelming quantities of a single familiar object, generating collaboration and interaction, Avila explores the resonance of multiples by utilizing them as tools of public intervention.
Avila’s practice is multidisciplinary, her repertoire gravitating between labor intense site-specific installations, sculpture, meticulous drawing, digital photography and film.                            
From topics as varied as cells to mass production, the artist investigates the public narratives of multiples as a reflection of the personal and the universal, the profound and the abject, chaos and order. Redefining the object, its purpose and symbolism, Marynes Avila’s practice is informed by Science and Nature, particularly Biology and Neuroscience, Carl Jung's concept of the Collective Unconscious and Depth Psychology. Recently the artist has produced a new body of work that includes microscopic digital photography of organic material and familiar objects. The magnified images reveal a world of multiplicity invisible to the naked eye.

Michelle Wilson, Canada

‘Becoming animal’ is a common idiom in contemporary discussions of human-animal and nonhuman-animal relationships, but are we not already, and always have been animal? I have come to understand the term as describing a state of attentiveness to our animality. In this state we become concatenated, recognizing the light of personhood in the eyes of another animal looking back, acknowledging that singularity is not synonymous with humanity.
The creatures I create are born out of living body-to-body, heart-to-heart, with my nonhuman companions, past and present. Our fleshy and vulnerable undersides exposed to one another, eyes asking, “Can you feel me?” I see a material; plasticine, clay, wax, soft downy roving and they combine with my thoughts and fears, the books I’ve read, and my dog Scooter’s gestures, his looks that tug on my insides. The outcome of my making is intuitive, but in no way mindless, and the affective power of these creatures remains beyond the grasp of my words, the means of my rational language. The deerhounds and fetuses I generate are both internal and external creatures, living and dead, of us and yet distressingly foreign. We want to pull them into us to comfort, but are uncertain of their diseased flesh. They are art objects and affective interlocutors appealing to us with their gaze.

Carol Howard Donati, Canada

A part of me, otherwise unspoken, becomes articulate while creating with my hands. I draw from inner expression, my background as an anthropologist, my appreciation of traditions of women’s work and design ideas taken from everyday life.  Referencing the familiar and the virtual hiddenness of things we take for granted is the starting point for my examination of broader issues of human concern such as questions of personhood, health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and global food security. I am drawn to natural fabrics, typically working with cotton, linen or silk, enhancing these with various layers of texture using dyes, paint, appliqué and stitch.
I frequently incorporate found objects and domestic materials in my work, juxtaposing ubiquitous household disposables with natural forms and colours as a way to provoke awareness. As an artist, my virtual sketchbook is nature photography. I live near the Petrie Island Wetlands and find taking photos there a meditative way to access creative thinking. I am always eager to expand my knowledge and experience of the natural world as a way to open to my senses and connect with inspiration.

Natasha 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.

Chantal Dupas, Canada

My work is rooted in a reflective interest in the cyclical and fragile nature of life. Through my studio practice and research, I have gravitated towards themes such as consumption, death and transformation in various capacities. Often, inspiration for bodies of work begins with analyses of certain experiences within natural environments, whether intentional or coincidental. I am motivated by the discovery of natural occurrences new to me and bring this sense of wonder and awe towards the mysteries of life into the studio, where I inevitably begin to question my affinities with and aversions to the world around us. My work has responded to phenomena in places ranging from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of Connecticut and to my own back yard. My most recent ventures have been delving into the world of botany, which stemmed from a residency at Riding Mountain National Park. Embracing my compulsion towards fact-based research and organization/categorization, I question whether these systems confront fears of mortality and perhaps are ways we deal with and control time. At the core of my practice, I am searching for experiences that remind me that I am within the natural systems I seek to gather information from.

Jackie Dorage, USA
K-Pg Boundary Oil on Canvas 30 x 30 inch

My work combines factual substance and scientific research with creative narratives to enlighten viewers and emotionally mimic the thrill of scientific discovery. Through reading journals, articles, and books, and partnering with scientists and conservationists, I weave together a story that visually represents the research while allowing the mystery of the unknown to persist. Accompanying each piece is a short statement or quote, meant to give the audience insight into the research behind the work, allowing the viewer to feel a sense of discovery and knowledge gaining from a piece of art.
Everything we witness—a flock of birds or a beetle on a leaf—has a deeper, sometimes unseen function that is interconnected with the environment around it. Whether I'm exploring the increasing role of marine “pollutogens” spread by cats or the fantastical qualities of the K-Pg boundary acting as a bookmark in Earths geological history, my main goal is illustrating the complex, living realities and mysteries of our natural world.
Through combining hard science with fantastical art, I hope to send my viewers on a journey mimicking the arch and thrill of research and learning—intrigue, questioning, investigation, and, finally, discovery.

Susan Rochester, USA
The foolishness of the chase ached her heart, 20 x 16 inches, Archival pigment print

My work examines the borders existing between natural and artificial habitats. I am interested in the trails humans and animals carve out and follow as they travel through their respective environments. Invisible boundaries dictate how comfortable beings are as their paths of travel intersect routes created by others. Human development denies and obliterates natural trails and habitats, yet animals continue to prevail in the face of the destruction of ecosystems. I am also fascinated and baffled by the human response to the natural world. The eradication of predators (to prevent real and/or imagined threats) leads to an overabundance of prey animals, which are then deemed as nuisances. Solutions range from repellent sprays to issuing suburban hunting licenses--yet rarely is there a careful consideration of what could happen if we just let things be. In my most recent series Trespasses, I explore what might occur if human-animal boundaries were more fluid, even permeable. Animals seem more adaptable to human encroachment than humans are to animal presence. But what if humans were equally adaptable? What if more doors and windows were left open? How would animals adapt, and what would happen to the human environment?
I was granted generous access to the natural history collections of the Douglas County Museum of Cultural and Natural History for this project. The museum holds over 1,000 freeze-dried specimens of local fauna. The preservation process retains the skeletal structure of the animals, and there is a resulting life-like quality to many of them that is uncanny. My inspiration for the resulting images comes from the formalism of still life traditions, especially the combination of the living (or lifelike) with the dead, and the concept of memento mori. I find additional inspiration in the darker aspects of folk tales and stories in which animals are anthropomorphized.

Flayed Frankenstein, Plasticized Hosta Leaves, Thread, Plant Matter, 2014

My work often incorporates detritus from my immediate atmosphere. Whether natural components of the Manitoba landscape or relics from my great grandparents’ homestead. I spend my time photographing and exploring the rural landscapes of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Iceland and elsewhere for inspiration. My travels have lead me to many derelict and abandoned buildings. Through visiting these places I feel that I have been able to gain a further understanding of spirituality and philosophy. I strive to focus on my personal experience as a springboard for exploration into ideas outside of my limited understanding. Through this process, I revel in attempting to create objects which quantify my own experiences. In my inevitable failure to do so, I feel as though I am able to express the space between ourselves and the outside world. Translating my inner landscape becomes an ambiguous representation of interiors which are occupied by all of us. Because of the specificity of my intent, the objects that I create are imbued with an aura of which I hope the viewer can explore and potentially find personal resonance with.
Currently, I am exploring the role of the feminine within science while endeavoring to express a less gendered perspective in understanding biology, inorganic/organic life, and evolution. My practice focuses on a hands-on approach to understanding scientific process as an access point into philosophical ideologies.

Natalie Draz, Canada

Natalie Draz is an artist working across multiple disciplines of printmaking, installation and fibres to create environments of expereintial mapmaking, storytelling and transformation of bodies. Investigating the structures of books, maps and anatomical studies as a source of alternative documentation and storytelling, Natalie creates works transgress the boundaries of book and body. Accessed through visual narrative strategies of pop-up books, engaging installations, and intimate moments of discovery and transformation through personal micro-narratives and sketches. Instead, her sculptural works touch upon installations; experiential environments; fragmentary visual texts to be pieced together by each individual viewer. 

Laura Grossett, USA
A Thin Barier, hand manipulated inkjet print on mylar, graphite. 11x8.5", 2013

I am attracted to ideas of preservation, absence and what it means to try and hold on to a thing or an idea as it slips away. This line of thought often leads me to thinking about endangered species and deforestation. In a very general sense, my work reflects an observation of the natural world.  I find forms and patterns that I respond to and that is where I begin. I often draw from specimens.  I used to work in a specimen collection library where I cataloged bird skins. I still find it peculiar to be in the presence of one of these static mimicries.  The feeling is especially poignant the individual is from an extinct or endangered species. Did did we assist in their depopulation in this one small way?  Maybe it will be in the interest of the greater good, sometimes the scientific data those skins provide help us manage current wildlife populations more effectively.  Well, we were able to save at least one.... sort of.  But, irony aside, it is a beautiful sort of honor- this preservation of a life.  When I worked in the collection room we spent time carefully organizing, labeling and tending to the bird mummies.  In some ways it was reminiscent of human burial traditions where the body is embalmed after death (although, in the case of bird skins, they were usually killed for the sole purpose of scientific study).  For awhile I made little bird skins out of metal and plastic: tiny forms that would last forever- even longer than the century-old specimens that inspired them.  After this I started another series where I cut similar shapes from sheet metal and embossed them into paper using an etching press.  To me these were symbolic of voids- they were the literal impressions left behind after death.  

Sarah Fagan, USA
Sustain, acrylic on paper, 21" x 16"

In a blend of painterly strokes and trompe l'oeil, I paint everyday objects in the medium of acrylic on panel. Like the vanitas painters of the Dutch Baroque, quotidian objects become symbols for something more. I offer not solely a reflection on mortality, but human psychology. Turning my back on the point of view typically employed by still life painters, I present my subjects from a direct aerial perspective, sans environment. The resulting visual immediacy forces confrontation between object and viewer. Accordingly, I consider the sensual and visual, as well as cerebral, impacts the chosen objects may deliver. I choose objects with a visceral draw: objects meant to be touched or used. As someone with synesthesia, wherein senses cross, I find this tactile impetus as natural for me as it is meaningful to the viewer. The concept of the hand is of import. Craftsmen tools, utensils, writing implements, and found natural objects engage the hand and, and thus the body, through the eye. These are "active" objects. As a foil to active objects is the "empty" object: the object of potential. Empty articles of clothing, blank sheets of paper, and smooth stones are vessels into which viewers may project their own emotions, tensions, completions, and gut reactions. These projections are the impetus of my work. The viewer takes on an active role not only by bringing her own connotations, memories, and histories to the objects themselves, but by unconsciously delving into her individual psychology when imagining narrative or meaning in composition. By visually grouping, pairing, and categorizing objects, I use the gesture of science without the technicality. I use a language that invites meaning without explanation. I orchestrate compositions with the recognition that symmetry and aestheticism invite contemplation. These qualities both draw in the eye and, in their artifice, allow the viewer to enter a world beyond the object. By deliberately  pairing objects with one another, cropped landscapes, and fields of color, the concept of narrative and meaning emerge, even though meaning itself may be veiled. What is of import is not the meaning I impose, but the need for the collective consciousness to find meaning in pattern, to see didacticism in arrangements. Likewise, it is not the unknown narrative that matters, but the human mind's necessity to make one. I place this onus on the viewer, as the most profound meanings come from within. Sartre famously explained this need with the phrase "existence precedes essence." As an artist, I search for pattern and meaning in the natural world, or study the framework of systems, charts, and graphs created by man. As various minds arrange systems and graft meaning on objects, interpretations are infinite.

Sophie Lindsey, England
Grass Work, 2013

As my work stems from observations, I predominantly make work about the everyday and art itself. However, I have a keen interest in the natural environment and enjoyed studying physical geography in education. This led me to partake in a placement in the Geology department at the University of Brighton. While I was able to create work throughout this, the main focus of my placement was comparing the similarities between art and geology. This led to Cross-Curricular: Art and Geology, a project which introduced geological samples into an art environment and land art into a geology lecture. However, as this placement was within a teaching framework the work was heavily informed by the way in which both disciplines were taught.
I am particularly interested in our relationship as humans to the natural world, and how we have progressed far beyond our natural state. Human manipulation of the environment is something I have briefly explored on my previous placement, and I am interested to see whether this is such a strong feature in  Canada, as it is very prevalent in UK.In considering these aspects combined with the approach I take in my practice, I anticipate creating something intervention based, potentially highlighting the bizarre conventions with have applied to life as a way to distance ourselves from the environment. However, the experience of Biophilia will undoubtedly shape what I make during and after the residency, and this may cause me to produce something I am unable to anticipate.