MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 20, 2023

This week we recognize    Cynthia Hooper   Cynthia Hooper, and her twenty plus year practice as a painter and research-based video artist located in Northern California.

Her early paintings (example above) from the mid to late 1990s, document the timber industry and related infrastructure in Humboldt County, California. This region's monumental log decks were once a ubiquitous sight—grand and metaphorical Ziggurats honoring the gods of progress and profit. Because of the depletion of historical timber stock (along with increased regulation and unpredictable cycles of market demand) far fewer of these iconic monuments are still around, though this industry remains regionally and internationally significant.

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Transnational Water: The Cienega de Santa Clara and the Mode, featured above, is an example of Hooper's essays/paintings describing anthropogenic wetlands in Mexico's Colorado River Delta and the wetlands' complex relationship with U.S. political and environmental policy. It is one of three panels presented for the exhibition Shifting Baselines, presented at the Santa Fe Art Institute made during the artists' residency and exhibition in 2012.

A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project, 2015 (above), is an interdisciplinary media project featuring six short observational documentary videos and accompanying essays that examine and interpret the built environment of Humboldt Bay—California's second largest estuary. This project investigates the bay's natural resource economy and infrastructure (including timber, fishing, and aquaculture), its transportation (including roads, rails, and ships), as well as the bay's power infrastructure—including formerly nuclear, fossil fuel, and renewable energy. The project also documents Humboldt Bay's natural and municipal watersheds, as well as its varied conservation zones and complicated shoreline. Each video features atypical and unexpectedly graceful views of the bay, and each accompanying essay includes evidence-based narratives that honor the diversity of perspectives and experiences that index these compelling environments.

Humedales Artificiales: Three Transnational Wetlands, 2012, is the title of a video and essay media publication about the anthropogenic wetlands of the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. In the video (above), Las Arenitas is an anthropogenic site and represents a highly successful and collaborative remedy for two big borderland challenges: wetland restoration and municipal infrastructure improvement. Municipal effluent from the Baja California city of Mexicali meanders through a maze of treatment wetlands that also support thousands of local and migratory birds. After helping the local environment, this repurposed water sometimes makes it way to the Gulf of California, thereby re-connecting the Colorado River by way of the sinks and toilets of 300,000 people.

Westlands, 2011 (below), is a two-channel video installation about The Westlands water district in California's San Joaquin Valley, which is undisputedly the largest and most powerful water district in the nation. This agricultural district's outsized and highly mechanized operations grow billions of pounds of tomatoes, almonds, pistachios, wheat and cotton for the global market each year. Westlands also has the country's highest poverty rate, lowest education levels, intractable pollution and tainted water. The story of this place typifies well-intentioned Federal policy gone awry: subsidies historically devised to foster a sustainable agrarian economy for the many now promote concentrations of power and profit for the few. Despite all these troubling metrics, however, the sweeping panoramas of efficiency and servitude that define this site as a phenomenological experience often complicate predictable assumptions about it. The subtle and grandiose visual metaphors found here possess undeniable political agency, but also a capacious poetry as well.

Cynthia Hooper          makes paintings, research-based videos and essays that examine and interpret infrastructural landscapes in the United States and Mexico. Her detailed investigations patiently capture the incidental and emblematic activities that define these complicated places, and advocate for the regional laborers, activists, and researchers who tactically refashion their complex geography. Her generously observational strategies and evidence-based narratives honor the diversity of perspectives that index the sites that she studies. Hooper has worked with Tijuana's complex urban infrastructure, politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border, and water, power, industrial and agricultural sites in California, Oregon, Arizona, and Ohio. Recent sites examined include the reconfigured wildlife refuges of California’s Central Valley, the artificial wetlands of Mexico's Colorado River Delta, and the built environment of California's Humboldt Bay. Exhibitions and screenings include the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Santa Fe Art Institute, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, and MASS MoCA. Published work includes Places Journal and Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Residencies and grants include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Gunk Foundation. She lives in Northern California.  www.cynthiahooper.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Cynthia Hooper, Eel River Log Deck, 1995, oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches; Transnational Water, 2011-2012, watercolor and gouache with essays on paper, 18 x 24 inches; A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project, 2015, videos and essays; Humedales Artificiales: Three Transnational Wetlands, 2012; Westlands, 2011, two-channel video installation, 6.5 minutes running time; portrait of the artist by Jesse Wiedel.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 13, 2023

This week we recognize  Perri Lynch Howard, and her twenty plus year practice in public art and acoustic installations.

Floating Datum: Fixed Grid, 2005 (above), an outdoor site-specific work, created an interstitial relationship between the natural rhythms of Pritchard Park, a 50-acre former Superfund environmental cleanup site on the shore of Bainbridge Island's Eagle Harbor in Washington State, and mankind’s systematic tendencies towards land use. Installed for three months, the work utilized 100% recycled materials and was designed to welcome the community back to a section of beach previously closed due to high toxicity. The poles reflect our human tendency to map and monitor and the wind sensors remind us to look and feel. Howard worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council. The site was also a former creosote factory.

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At Ease, 2008-2011 (above), was a temporary public art project sited at Warren G. Magnuson Park in Seattle, Washington. Located at the primary threshold between the park and surrounding neighborhood, the work transformed a neglected, empty, and vandalized guard shack into a symbol of Magnuson’s military past, and transitional present, and the ongoing commitment to balance human wants and environmental needs. Howard used vinyl graphics and lit the structure from within. Project partners were Seattle Parks & Recreation, 4 Culture and Rainier Industries.

Working from audio archives at Ocean Alliance in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Howard created a compilation of signature hydrophone whale recordings from expeditions led by Dr. Roger Payne, its founder, along with colleagues dating back to 1967. Visitors entered the Ocean Alliance headquarters library, where the collection of reel-to-reels are archived, and the gallery where the artists’ sound works echoed through the space via a 4-channel speaker system while immersed in hanging textile scrolls (above), each printed with spectrogram imagery that visualize the recordings. The installation, titled Once Upon a Whale Song, was created in 2022.

A Gathering Storm, 2021 (below), included photography and photogravure, images of harbor defenses sited near the coastal waters of Puget Sound, Washington, along with field sound recordings. Fort Worden, Fort Casey, and Fort Flagler are just three of over seventy-five coastal forts that protect our harbors, cities, and waterways in the United States. Many of these emplacements are on the front lines of climate change, but were never designed to face this sort of surge. This work harnesses the power of sound to tell the little-known story of Coastal Defenses in the United States, their stalwart past, and present day vulnerabilities.

“The work evolves in series, sharing a common theme and employing a wide range of media; from painting and printmaking to drawing and collage. Subtle qualities of landscape are combined with symbols, maps, and icons to convey the complexity of real-world experience, relating to the ‘there-ness’ of everything.” perri lynch howard

Frequencies: Standing Watch, 2022 (below), is a painting from Howard's Frequencies’ series, which was inspired by extreme environments where sea meets shore and land meets sky. The work explores patterns of light and sound traveling over, under, and through the landscape, shaping our sense of place.

Perri Lynch Howard is an artist dedicated to forging new narratives from the front lines of climate change. Working in the context of extreme environments is an essential aspect of Ms. Howard’s practice, driving her curiosity to seek a deeper sense of place, beyond the dichotomy of near and far. Her artwork is a charting or mapping of sites and situations expressed through painting, drawing, sculpture and sound. Originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts, Howard received her BA from The Evergreen State College, BFA from the University of Washington, and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is represented by the Seattle Art Museum Gallery. She has recently completed afield recording expedition to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, investigating the impacts of anthropogenic marine noise on whales and arctic sea life. This work was funded by the McMillen Foundation. Her projects have received support from numerous residencies and fellowships including the Montello Foundation, Civita Institute, Willapa Bay AiR, PLAYA, Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, Jack Straw Artist Support Program, Centrum Foundation, and the Mamori Sound Project, among others. Howards’s art has a global reach through projects completed in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, and in South India as a Fulbright Scholar. www.perrilynchhoward.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Perri Lynch Howard,Floating Datum: Fixed Grid, 2005, Spinnaker cloth, aluminum supports, PVC pipes, 10 x 60 x 60 feet, Pritchard Park, Brainbridge Island, Washington; At Ease, 2008, vinyl graphic on existing structure, lighting from within, commissioned by Seattle Parks & Recreation, located at Warren G. Magnuson Park, Seattle, Washington; Once Upon a Whale Song, 2022, textile scrolls and sound, installation at Ocean Alliance, Gloucester, Massachusetts; A Gathering Storm, 2021, photography, photogravure, and sound; Frequencies: Standing Watch, 2022, painting with sound, 48 x 30 inches; self portrait of the artist.

Walking Away (Water Ceremony), 2022, still from video, print on metal

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira

Nov 29, 2022

Interview conducted by Kate Mothes for wethemuse.art

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira is an Oakland-based multimedia artist who centres her practice on ideas of embodiment and physical presence in the world. Relationships between ourselves and nature, the space around us, the time of day, momentous events, and the seasons are captured in a range of video, sculpture, dance, installation, and music. She often collaborates with artists and performers who focus on meditation and healing practices, and as a teacher, works with students to envision ways that art can translate physical, emotional, and spiritual experience into new ways of seeing. Independent curator and WTM mentor Kate Mothes met with Koym-Murteira in November on Zoom to discuss ideas around perception, presence, memory, and her most recent project Unseen to Seen, which collaboratively explored responses to the pandemic.

Kate Mothes: There's a lot of research that goes into your work. And probably, I'm assuming from teaching, there's an element of constantly gleaning information as you’re working with students.

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira: I actually did a lot of the [plaster] casting and different things with students for the Unseen to Seen project. So that was a chance to break my practice into my teaching, which I've been trying to do more and more.

The framework [of my practice] is really the idea of embodiment, like, how are we physically present? That arches over like everything. In our emails, you were asking about the perception. And perception is actually like an embodiment tool. I really think that a lot of us become artists because we need a meditation system. And art, for me, it's like a moving meditation system.

Anyway, I got to teach this embodiment art class and did some of the practices that I’d just done by myself, but with a larger group. So I see that's kind of a thing that I would like my practice to grow into: getting to do kind of social art practice with larger groups, like doing body-casting or different embodiment practices. That's all very art-related. You know, ‘Is that embodiment?’

Shadow Gesture, 2022, interactive projection

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© David Paul Bayles and Frederick J Swanson, Standing, Still. #3, 2020

David Paul Bayles and Frederick J. Swanson: Following Fire: A Resilient Forest, An Uncertain Future by Linda Alterwitz

January 17, 2023 for Lenscratch

In the series Following Fire: A Resilient Forest/ An Uncertain Future, (2020 – present) photographer David Paul Bayles and scientist Frederick J. Swanson collaborate to explore post-fire landscape. The photographs by Bayles and text by Swanson contribute to their investigations of forest resilience in the face of increasing challenges and environmental uncertainties. By sharing this series of photographs, they add to the education, appreciation, and future of the forests.

This Following Fire project is part of long-term ecological inquiry based at the nearby H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest program where studies have been underway for 75 years, and experiments have design-lives of 200 years. In this spirit they intend to pass on the project, and even the photography equipment, to the next generations of photographer-scientist teams.

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"The investigation of unusual materials is just as significant in this process. It is the tangible handling and manipulation of substances to form new stories for an object. I’m attracted to materials that have a history specific to experiences of a life before I discover them. Objects have a memory through their original use, but can continue to form new memories once transformed. It is a form of up-cycling too. They have included doors, windows, drawers, leather gloves, stones, sand, tree branches, plastic trash, human hair, and on-and-on.
Silk organza is another favored material. Scarred and stitched textures, transformed from the fabric I stain, metaphorically mimic surfaces, whether ours or in nature. They contribute to the effort to re-contextualize my sculptures and installations and impart a new role."

"Hair is another significant signature in my work. Its intrinsic links to DNA and its endearing symbolism loom large in the art. Stained organza is stuffed with human hair to form trees, roots, stumps, ladders and animals in the installations and are a symbiotic link to hair living beyond death. Hair remains a collective binder for mortality. As an artist, I want to provoke the viewer emotionally and viscerally. I ask: “How do I present the complexity and seriousness of complex environmental issues to motivate recognition and action?”

Babs Reingold is a Venezuela-born American artist who creates sculptures, drawings and installations, focusing on the environment, poverty and beauty. She has an extensive history exhibiting in solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums from New York to Los Angeles and internationally. Recent exhibits include "Lost Trees" – a solo installation at HCC Gallery 221 Tampa FL  •  Address: Earth – Hudson Valley MOCA Peekskill NY • Water Over the Bridge: Contemporary Seascapes – Morean Art Center • Planet Ax4+1 – David & Schweitzer Gallery Brooklyn NY • Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration – St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts. Her installation, The Last Tree a solo exhibit had a six-month run at Burchfield Penney Art Center Buffalo NY. It had debuted earlier at the ISE Cultural Foundation in SOHO NY. Reingold has a MFA SUNY-Buffalo and BFA Cleveland Institute of Art. Her primary studio is in St Petersburg, Floria with viewing space in New York City.  babsreingold.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Babs Reingold, The Last Tree, Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2016-2017, silk Organza, rust, tea, human hair, encaustic, string, thread, yarn, 194 pails, video with music soundtrack by Lin Culbertson, approximately 25 x 40 x 14 feet; The Last Sea, 2018, Wood boat coated with paper mache and modeling paste, graphite, rust and tea stained. Animals: rust and tea stained silk organza stuffed with human hair, cheesecloth, leather, thread, yarns, nails, rusted chain, and used plastic debris, approximately 144w x 36h x 168L inches; Lost Trees, 2022, Silk organza, cotton organza, yarn, thread, graphite on panel prepared with modeling paste, wood stumps and branches, old pails, upcycled cast paper bricks from junk mail and old files, drawings on paper and panel, approximately 32 x 26 feet; Hair Nest (left to right) ’01” 2020, Hair Nest ’16” 2018-2020, Hair Nest ’15” 2019; Last Sea: Diorama, 2020, Wood boat, paddles and windows, rust/tea-stained silk organza, cheesecloth, thread, yarn, string, rusted chain, old nails, miniature plastic bottles, tree branches, marble stones, beach sand, Giclee prints of monotypes, 20 x 16 x 14 inches; Portrait of the artist by Grace Roselli, Pandora's BoxX Project.

(Salvia Divinorum 2 Enhanced, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

Unfolding Knowledge, One Leaf at a Time:
Science meets Art and Activism in Pflugheber and White’s Microcosms Project

Interview by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein

Jill Pflugheber and Steven White have created layers of fascination, activism, and learning through their visually stunning Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas (https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/). A sparkling example of the intersection between arts and sciences, Steven and Jill use microscopy to reveal the innerworkings of sacred plants to the Americas. By promoting indigenous knowledge bases within both artistic and scientific academic disciplines, they are supporting a vital and much overdue spotlight on some of the most important information about the very ground we live on and the people who spent thousands of years learning from and about it. Their work was featured at the Chamanismo (Shamanism) exhibition held at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile in 2022.

(Datura Innoxia, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

Jill and Steven, these images are enrapturing. Microcosms is not only beautiful, but also scientific. Can you specify what the color microscopy is depicting here (cholorphyll, proteins, stomata, etc.)? What have you learned about both the plants and their visual properties in this process?

These confocal images were acquired by scanning the plant (leaves or flowers mostly) with three lasers. The plants were not labeled with any dyes or stains, so the only fluorescence (blue, green or red) we see is from components of the plant that will fluoresce under these light conditions. This means it is not possible to delineate exactly what structure is what color. Additionally, there may be a variety of molecules excited by the same laser line—so multiple structures may emit the same color. A single structure or molecule may excite/emit more than one color at a time, giving a range from purple to yellows. Chlorophyll is most often green but can be blue as well. Stomata often have blue guard cells, and these cells may have different colored proteins within them. Xylem is often green. Terpenes may be any color, depending on the terpene, and so on. Open stomata, closed stomata; terpenes traveling down trichomes; pollen at various stages of maturation. We are visualizing not just structure, but function as well.

(Brugmansia spp., Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

That is amazing! The structures that are revealed are enthralling and beautiful. It is incredible to see the actual functioning of the plant in visual form. And your interest in the function of the plants goes beyond aesthetics. How have you approached choosing your specimen?

We conceived our work in Microcosms as a double homage to the sacred plants of the American continent (with its immense geographical diversity that includes both deserts and rainforests) and also to the indigenous knowledge holders who have safeguarded the stories that the plants tell.  The idea of “sacredness” can be difficult to define. Shouldn’t all plants and all life in its tremendous, though ever-diminishing, diversity be considered sacred? Of course. But certain species, for different reasons, are more culturally significant than others, as many readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass have discovered. Microcosms selectively highlights a significant, though still relatively small, number of plants forming a spiritual pact that ensures the wellbeing and survival of all species. Using a term that is part of his Rarámuri (Tarahumara) heritage, Enrique Salmón explains the importance of iwígara in the introduction to Iwígara, the Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science: “In a worldview based on iwígara, humans are no more important to the natural world than any other form of life. This notion influences how I lead my own life and guides many of my decisions. Knowing that I am related to everything around me and share breath with all living things helps me to focus on my responsibility to honor all forms of life.” We learned a great deal by researching the plants for Microcosms and also by taking care of them, in their complete cycles from germination to flowering.  

(Datura Innoxia, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

When you describe caring for these plants during their complete cycles, it reminds me of rituals and goals of some interspecies collaboration projects. Currently, more and more research is coming to light about the intersection of hallucinogens and psychological healing as well. How do these properties intersect for you within this realm of science, native histories and contemporary healing?

It’s certainly true that often the revered plants that appear in Microcosms are psychoactive. The two authors of Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers (1998) discuss why these special vegetal entities are so important.  According to the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann (the Swiss scientist who was the first to synthesize LSD): “Plants that alter the normal functions of the mind and body have always been considered by peoples of nonindustrial societies as sacred, and the hallucinogens have been plants of the gods par excellence […] It is in the New World that the number and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants are overwhelming, dominating every phase of life among the aboriginal peoples.” The slightly bigger picture with regard to Microcosms and plants such as tobacco, amaranth, cacao, corn, sweetgrass and others is without a doubt more nuanced and well worth one’s attention. Current scientific research on the so-called natural psychedelics (such as magic mushrooms, the plants that together make ayahuasca, and certain cacti) is demonstrating in definitive ways potential health benefits. Absurdly repressive anti-drug laws around the world will need to change in order to accommodate these new realities. This is happening already. Canada and certain places in the United States such as Oregon, Colorado, and even Washington, D.C. are leading the way toward a more just treatment of plants and substances that will become the future treatments of many debilitating diseases. Perhaps Microcosms can contribute in a small way with other myriad efforts toward the creation of this change of consciousness. 

(Lophophora Williamsii Peyote, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023 and digital photograph)

This relates well to where your work is being presented at the Chamanismo (Shamanism) exhibition held at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile. Do you see this as an opportunity to contribute to this change of consciousness?

Yes, we were so pleased and honored to learn that Constantino Manuel Torres, the curator of the exhibition “Shamanism: Visions Outside of Time,” (open through June 2023) chose some of our confocal images of Anadenanthera colubrina and Trichocereus pachanoi for the show’s catalog and publicity. It was amazing to see a microscopic San Pedro cactus on a gigantic banner hanging from the roof of the museum illuminating a busy city street. As Torres points out in the published catalog text: “From shamanism we can learn how to develop an intimate knowledge of our immediate environment, to view the city and its surroundings as an entity full of patterns that can be traversed and understood. Such knowledge of the urban environment brings with it and demonstrates the interconnectedness of all component elements. Indigenous cultures all over the world over centuries have intelligently developed concepts of what is proper for them and their setting at a moment in time.” These are powerful ideas that can orient our contemporary actions (wherever we live) in conjunction with a respectful understanding of the sacred plants that we have included in Microcosms. 

(Hierochloe Odorata, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

The theme of interconnectedness is increasingly important as a symbol and as an actualization. Can these images act as metaphors that bridge misinformation in cultural understanding?

Microcosms is an ecodigital repository of biocultural heritage. As we mention in the introduction to the website, each stoma, each trichome, each patterned fragment of xylem and vascular tissue, as well as each grain of pollen in these vital portraits is not only a way into previously unseen vegetal realms, but also a potential way out of a collective ecological crisis. EcoArtSpace sponsored a really inspiring Tree Talk last October called “Fire Transforms” by curator, teacher and art activist Rina C. Faletti. She’s written a brief commentary on Microcosms, and in it she says: “Going far beyond what might appear to be another illustrative account of the beauty of plant patterns, shapes, and colors at an unseen scale, White and Pflugheber successfully argue not only for the organism as art, but also art as organism. Here the project extends its reach from the patently visual to deeper realities of consciousness, agency, equality of lifeforms.” We fervently hope that Microcosms, while paying tribute to the indigenous stewards who have preserved ancestral plant knowledge over the millennia, serves as a call to urgent, empathic, morally based activism as conservators, creators and informed citizens against the political and economic systems that are so irrevocably harmful to the environment. 

(Anadenanthera colubrina, Microcosms, color microscopic photograph 2023)

Thank you for this truly incredible work, Jill & Steven! It has been fantastic to learn from you. 

The ecoartspace February 2023 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

A Warning to Slow Down: In Conversation with Lauren Strohacker and Dr. Lisa Minerva Tolentino

By Erin Johnson

Published January 19, 2023 with Burnaway

A red light races, doubles back, and moves swiftly along the edges of the corridors and stairways in the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art exhibition Old Red, I Know Where Thou Dwellest. The installation, titled Leukos Lukos after the slippage between the Greek words for wolf and light, is the work of Lauren Strohacker and Dr. Lisa Minerva Tolentino. It lives on the periphery of transient spaces and is controlled by an algorithm that turns LED strips into flashes of color left in the wake of running animals in the woods. 

Like Strohacker and Tolentino, I’m interested in how canids are experienced, represented, and imagined, and what that can tell us about being human. In my two-channel video Heavy Water, a biologist working for the Savannah River Site (Aiken, GA) delivers a lecture about wild dogs whose mythic relationship to the protected three-hundred square-mile nuclear weapon facility is embellished to justify its displacement of local residents, and obscure the violence sustained by its activities. The video’s two channels enact a confluence between two epic timelines: the deep history of the Carolina dogs, who some speculate descend from the continent’s first wolves, and the precarious future imperiled by nuclear weapons programs and the production of radioactive waste. 

Leukos Lukos is one of three works in Strohacker’s solo exhibition that takes as its starting point the very real possibility that red wolves will become extinct in the wild for a second time. The last known group of wild individuals live in and around the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina, just four hours from SECCA. 

Go to interview here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

January 23, 2023

This week we recognize   Liz McGowan, and her nature-based practice in the United Kingdom.

"I work in conversation with the Norfolk landscape, exploring the meeting points between inner and outer landscapes.My inspirations are the detail, pattern and processes – reed, mud, wind, wave, erosion, tideline, that combine to form a particular environment.My personal concerns are about containment and expansion, about cycles of growth, change and decay, and about the shifting relationship between us and the world in which we are immersed."

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Inside Outside was a reed installation sited on the Waveney Valley Sculpture Trail, 2014-2015 (above), which is a fine structure of walls made from reed that meanders and curls in upon itself to form a hide. When the act of seeking shelter–under a tree, in a cave–becomes the act of making shelter, there is a fundamental shift in the way in which one perceives the world: ‘outdoors’ happens because we have made an ‘indoors’. Once we are ‘inside’, we experience ourselves as no longer visible to us, no longer a part of the ‘outside. The ‘outside’ becomes ‘other’, a place of potential menace that we need protection from.

In McGowan's Spirit Wraps Around Me series (above), each of her cloaks is made with materials from a specific Norfolk habitat – tideline, reedbed and barley field. The cloak mediates between the human body and the landscape it emerges from. It’s an invitation to immerse oneself in the more than human world, like plunging into cold water. More than that, by referencing ritual cloaks, it opens up the possibility of a connection with the genius loci, the deep spirit of the land.

McGowan's Chthon earthworks series (above), refers to the Greek word for 'earth,’ referring specifically to that which is under the earth. In English, ‘chthonic’ describes deities or spirits of the underworld. These works are the result of playing with saltmarsh mud in liquid and solid form, to create patterns and sculptures, exploring what it does and how it moves.

Tidelines, made in 2018 (below), was inspired by the fluid patterns carved into their spindle whorls by the Haida people, a coastal seafaring nation of North West Canada. Using plastics collected from the English and Welsh coastlines over many years and set on repurposed plexiglass the work was influenced by Indigenous designs that spoke to McGowan, who is also an island dweller that spends her time by the sea whenever she can.

Liz McGowan  has worked with natural and found materials for over two decades, creating responses to particular environments through installation, sculpture, drawing and conversation. Her focus is the meeting point between inner and outer landscapes, where personal creativity is given inspiration and form by those elements – stone, reed, tree, earth, tideline – that combine to form a landscape. lizmcgowan.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Liz McGowan, Reed Fans, 2017, reed installations at Cley Marshes Visitor Centre; Inside Outside, 2012, reed installation by Liz McGowan and Jane Frost for Aisle and Air, a curated exhibition at Cley church and surroundings; Tideline Cloak, 2021, Spirit Wraps Around Me series, The Yare Gallery, Great Yarmouth; From Tree to Apple, 2022, earth, apples, shrew skulls, raptor feathers (apple becomes shrew, shrew becomes windhover, becomes will-a-wix, becomes buzzard) Chthon earthworks series, work on paper; Tidelines, 2018, found plastics, set on plexiglass; below, portrait of the artist, wearing Chalk Stream Cloak photographed by Harry Cory Wright.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

January 16, 2023

This week we recognize  Constance Mallinson, and her forty plus year practice as a painter in Los Angeles, California. 

"My earliest paintings are minimalist, and upon moving to Los Angeles in the late 1970’s I started to explore and connect with feminist artists and feminist art theory. I wanted to change from the hardcore reductive work that I was doing to something more personal, and this type of work felt really personal to me. For me, the tiny insistent repetitious marks were a way for me to assert my female body and presence. There is an insistence in building up a surface of thousands and thousands of tiny marks that is quite different from casting a piece with steel. This is my body engaging with the material."

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More recently, Mallinson has engaged in apocalyptic imagery of the sublime landscape, as in "The Large Blass-t" (above), depicting a free fall of post-consumer objects through smoky skies, items she culled from urban streets. Now useless, these objects are dispensed of human attention and in their decaying state. They seem to challenge their own existence, with abundance transposed into waste. The paradox of higher standards of living as manifested by hyperconsumption and resulting ecological disasters is critical to understanding her work.

The artists' epic panoramic landscapes painted from 2001 to 2009 (above) began as an investigation into the relationship between photographic and painted representations of landscape. Literally thousands of appropriated landscape images were “collaged” via painting to form dense imaginary landscapes incorporating multiple perspectives from the microcosmic to the macro, and conflicting narratives. Superseding the traditional single view of the landscape, they engage ideas of received information and its overriding influence on our perceptions of the natural, as well as question historicist ideologies such as the Edenic, the pastoral, and the gendered gaze. Spanning geography, time zones, and seasons, these paintings are tours de force intheir scale and execution and have been appreciated for their ability to seduce and deliver a critique while simultaneously positing a continuing relevance for painting in an era of ubiquitous mass media.

Mallinson's Nature Morte paintings (above and below), are inspired by decaying natural materials and often include Archimboldo-esque human figures. Twisted branches, rotting stumps and logs, curling dried leaves and desiccated flora collected from the artists' daily walks through Los Angeles’ streets and canyons were painted from direct observation in a technique reminiscent of botanical illustration or trompe d’oeil. Some are painted on grainy plywood as “backdrops” for decomposing woodland scenes or Renaissance like saints. Suggesting a mutual vulnerability and destruction in an era of environmental instability, the paintings also represent a ruination of the previous pristine, scenery of her panoramic paintings or the progressive productions of Modernism itself. In some, fragments of human-made objects are intermingled with the flora and fauna to form eccentric, post-apocalyptic constructions, both an incrimination of wasteful consumer culture and a monument to its ongoing ingenuity.

Constance Mallinson  (b.1948, Washington, D.C.)     is a Los Angeles based painter, writer and curator. During her career, she has exhibited widely and her critically acclaimed paintings are included in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The San Jose Museum, and the Pomona Art Museum, the National Academy of Sciences. She has taught all levels of studio art and criticism at the major colleges and universities in Southern California and has written for many art publications such as Art in America, Xtra, Artillery, the Times Quotidian, and numerous catalog essays for university art museums. Her most recent curatorial projects have included “Urbanature” at ArtCenter College of Design, "The Feminine Sublime" at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and “Small is beautiful” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. Mallinson is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a COLA Fellowship. Twenty-four of her collages, transferred to porcelain enamel steel, are permanently installed at the Bergamot Station Metro Station.  www.constancemallinson.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Constance Mallison, #2 (Green and Pink), 1979, acrylic on canvas, 66 1/2 x 94 inches; Large Blass-t, 2016, oil on canvas, 60 x 192 inches; What Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 2007, oil on canvas, 60 x 216 inches, from panoramic landscape series; You, 2008, oil on Rives paper, from the Nature Morte Series (2009-2011); Lost Woods, 2014, oil on plywood, 48 x 96 inches, from the Nature Morte Series (2009-2011); below, portrait of the artist taken by Eric Alter, 1977.