This Artist Uses Trees and Maps to Imagine a Colorado with No Drought

Meredith Nemirov makes topography beautiful

published by Orion Magazine, Autumn 2022

MEREDITH NEMIROV HAS SPENT THE last 30 years walking in the forests of southwest Colorado.

While mainly an observational painter, Meredith’s experience of spending time drawing and painting among aspen trees led her to intense visual explorations of naturally occurring phenomena, reflected in her series Blowdown, which abstractly depicts the mycorrhizal fungi growing beneath the forest floor. Most recently, her series Rivers Feed the Trees uses old topographical maps of Colorado, where she paints the color blue into all the canyons, arroyos, and dry washes to create an abundance of rivers and streams.

“Meredith plays with perspective. She transforms topographic maps–aerial views of our landscape–into both the grounds the trees are planted in and the sky that frames them as they grow vertically. We love what this suggests about the different relationships and connections found in nature,” says a curator from the gallery in Telluride that represents her work.

This visual representation is meant to be akin to an Indigenous rain dance ceremony, a weather-modification ritual that attempts to invoke rain.

Through these works the artist hopes to bring attention to processes occurring in the natural world.

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