Installation View, Ecologies of Restoration by DM Witman, Danforth Art Museum, 2024

Transdisciplinary artist DM Witman talks with GroundTruth Director Margaret LeJeune about her work on the polycrisis including how her background as a field biologist has informed her creative processes. Witman’s work has been exhibited in over 120 solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and she has been awarded residencies at Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (Maine), Monson Arts (Maine), and How to Flatten A Mountain (Ireland). She is the recipient of grants from the Maine Arts Commission, The Kindling Fund and Warhol Foundation, The John Anson Kittredge Fund, and the Puffin Foundation. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Museum of Art (Maine); and CICA Museum (Korea), among others, and she is affiliated with photo-eye Gallery (New Mexico) and the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (Maine). Witman holds an MFA from Maine Media College and a BS in Environmental Science from Kutztown University. #ecoartist #womenphotographers #environmentalphotography

DM Witman

Interview on April 7 for Ground Truth Institute

Margaret LeJeune: I first learned of DM Witman’s work when I was invited to curate an exhibition titled Agency for Broto: Art-Climate-Science’s 2021 conference, a project of the Cape Cod Center for Sustainability. The questions which drove my curatorial process included “what exists at the intersection of empowerment, the climate crisis, and radical empathy? what does agency look like in a post-human world? and, can it be ascribed to non-human species, rivers and/or ecosystems?” Witman’s video work Witness, which was included in the exhibition, addresses environmental disruption and humanity’s role in global degradation. In this work, a nude figure is seen perched atop a block of ice that changes color through the duration of the piece as the sounds of a reverberating boat engine and cracking ice intensifies. Next to the figure, a video of waves crashing ashore within a sterile oval frame suggests nature as compartmentalized artifice. This work can be viewed here.

Since then, I have followed Witman’s work closely. In 2023, I invited her to have a solo exhibition, Solastalgia Times, at the Red Door Gallery at Bradley University. And in 2024 we began to share space more regularly as we worked together as members of the Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education. The conversation below reflects my curiosity to learn more about DM’s motivations and processes in her work on environmental grief and ecological shifts.

ML: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me about your creative practice for the GroundTruth archive. One of the most compelling things about your work is how it visualizes grief, healing, and ecological loss. When did you first recognize mourning as an ecological condition rather than only a personal one?

DM: I first felt it when I worked as a field environmental scientist, it was by experience. The field work I conducted was for baseline studies and permitting for infrastructure projects. This was in my early 20s. Quite quickly I became acutely aware of change, destruction, transformation of the natural and semi-natural spaces. I didn’t have a name for it, but it was very real and at times incredibly intense. It wasn’t until many years later that I became aware that it could be more than my singular experience, that eco-distress and mourning is really an existential issue. This was shortly after working on the series “Melt”.

DM Witman, eom no. 1 from the series Ecologies of Mourning, 2023-24, 18 x 15”, unique gold-toned salted-paper on handmade abaca

ML:  In Ecologies of Mourning, you describe grief and healing as non-linear and liminal. How does photography, particularly process-based and material experimentation, allow you to hold that ambiguity?

DM: I have learned a great deal about loss and mourning, through experience and research. There are a number of psychological and social models which provide for an understanding of how humans process and experience loss–in each there is the element of time. And how this unfolds over time is unique to each of us.  When I work with materials, photographic or not, time is an essential component. Allowing materials to respond and unfold, is directly tied to the idea and/or experience at hand. Life is ambiguous, it is change over time, it is dynamic, as are our bodies and everything else (mostly)around us. This liminal place of working, allows me to consciously sit in this space of ambiguity and attempt to understand.

Continue reading here