Vernal Exhibition Roundtable: Climate, Place, and the Natural World

Friday Arts asked Vernal exhibition artists Rebecca Allan, Hon Eui Chen, Grace DeGennaro, Christy Gast, Grace Hager, Stephen Hendee, Emily Pettigrew, Halsey Rodman, Molly Smith, rocki swiderski, and Hai Zhang to reflect on how their work engages with the landscape, place, and the natural world in this moment of climate disruption.

Friday Arts

How you approach the natural world in the moment of climate disruption? Does the climate crisis factor into your work?

Rebecca Allan

As a professional gardener, I draw directly from the experiences of pruning, cultivating, planting and caring for trees and plants. I also serve as a board member for the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, which brings me into direct contact with the consequences of climate change. More importantly though, by attending in simple ways to the care of our environments, we demonstrate ways to preserve it for future generations.

Stephen Hendee

I'm interested in creating artifacts which are about this moment in technology where we appear to be hitting this ceiling, which has to do with climate change and our effect on the environment. I want to create objects that show that there's people who see what the potential is.

Grace Hager

The natural world is a source of rejuvenation, a model for hope and balance. As with any contemporary landscape-based artist, I find it hard to imagine the climate crisis has no effect on one’s work. My work stems from a strong felt connection and a way of life based in observing, understanding, and revering the natural world handed down to me from my scientist parents. When that natural world feels exploited, under threat, misunderstood or undervalued, it changes the significance and urgency of making landscape images, especially images of its beauty.

Molly Smith

I see the natural world as having a divine perfection. It is a system whole unto itself. When I lived in the city, my work showed the human influence on nature, but after living and working closely with natural ecosystems through practicing regenerative farming, I respect a greater wisdom and resilience in nature and don't feel the need to include or comment on it in my work now.

rocki swiderski

i only have one world and its a pink cliff at moonrise and electrical transformers and data centers and sun rotten stucco and cholla skeletons and a pronghorn stuck on one side of the border wall and a tangle of cables and highways and saguaro blooms and underwhelming monsoon seasons and uranium mining and an empty lot full of trash and also bluebells and swamp coolers and big momentary water and micaceous sand.

Halsey Rodman

My approach to the natural world is that either all or none of it is natural: the redwoods, the mountains, the oceans, lakes, streams, the plastic, the silicone, the PTFE, the cobalt, the zinc, paper pulp and printers ink and the windows in envelopes, meteorites, sublimation, love, underwater data cable, wind turbines, anxiety, and the back-up sirens from the bus depot across the street from my house; everything is a process.

I am completely freaked out by the natural/un-natural divide because it’s so often used as a wedge to exert power (as in the current rhetoric and cruel action around immigration in the USA today). And I have urgent feelings about the idealization around (true) nature that leads so directly to fascism. That said, I revere everything that’s commonly referred to as the natural world and though I live in a city, I feel completely assailed by the lights and noise and the constant grind of construction. I am desperate to see the stars and to hear the sounds of the world without me.

I’m just not sure if we can learn to live sustainably on this planet if nature is always elsewhere, if it’s some kind of ideal thing that’s always being spoiled by our presence. Everything that is part of the world changes it. Our climate is changing rapidly due to human interventions in the long-term processes of the world's ecology. What would it be like to think of duration instead of nature?

Grace DeGennaro

I use my materials carefully and sparingly, attempting to coax as much meaning as I can from as little as possible.

Emily Pettigrew

I try to spend as much time as I can interacting with, and immersing myself in landscape. I definitely feel an urgency to experience it in the worry that it may not linger.

Christy Gast

I serve on my town's Conservation Advisory Council, collaborate on art and advocacy projects around peatland protection, and I also consulting for art and culture nonprofits to get funding to decarbonize their facilities. So I'm learning about state regulations, MEP planning, scaled advocacy . . . and I also try to spend a decent amount of time mucking about in swamps and mangroves.

Hai Zhang
For a long time, we have been disconnected from the reality of the natural world. We tend to see nature as a parallel world or merely as a source of materials. We do not truly see ourselves as one with it. Technological progress has shielded much of the population—especially in developed countries—from directly experiencing the crisis. On the other hand, those same advancements have intensified our separation from nature.

I try to investigate the role I can play—what I truly need from the natural world, and what nature might need from us. For me, the most compelling aspect of art is imagination. Imagination is essential in helping us integrate with what surrounds us, including nature. Art does not bear the responsibility to solve problems. It bears the responsibility to raise questions.

How do you think about place in relation to your work?

Grace DeGennaro

The air, water, light and the dark night sky in Maine infuse my work with their qualities of austerity and clarity.

Rebecca Allan

My work attempts to express an equivalent, in a painterly language, to the atmospheres, geologies, ecologies and histories of particular places, many of them associated with gardens, quarries or wildlands. These include places that I've lived in or traveled to for my work in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and southeastern Kentucky, nurseries gardens in the United States, France and the UK.

Molly Smith

Place is the main subject in my work and has transformed over the past three decades that the landscape has been in my paintings. I began with longing for nature, working from images of other people's travels. I then moved to working from my own images, but from nature cropped from city landscapes—in the parks or above buildings and power lines. Now I live immersed in the nature I represent and often work without images but from memory and daily views of the landscape that surrounds me.

rocki swiderski

my work is deeply informed by place, the desert, this (sonoran) desert, the no-placeness of deserts, the treatment of land when it’s considered empty or undesirable or belonging to no one.

Christy Gast

Place is never neutral for me. It’s charged, specific, and usually a little unruly. Places, like artworks, are always in conversation with deep time. That goes for peat bogs, art history, and the patch of sumac in the swale at the edge of my yard. I like to understand the material intelligence of a place, where climate, trade and ecology meet, and let that knowledge work its way into process.

Halsey Rodman

I think of place as a concentration of processes; many scales of time overlapping in a set of conditions we refer to as being a particular place. Place is temporal, an event as much as a location. I choose this mode of definition because place is always on the move; every place is many places depending on who, what, and when you ask. There is no true place because transition from one state to another, whether thinking on a macro-geologic or micro-atomic scale, is continuous. Every place becomes different continuously and simultaneously.

My work seeks to elevate the specificity of conditions, that this particular configuration of light, leaf, stem, branch, paper, and graphite will never happen again; tomorrow night everything will be different: the plant will grow, the paper will move, the night breeze and cicadas will make a new chorus and my hand will waver in a different way.

I try to form nodes where the specificity of conditions, of place, of process can produce form, can leave a trace, an impression, an afterimage. I’ve always wanted to see before and after the present tense, the before and after of a place, and at the same time I know there’s nothing but this perpetual present process; my work reflects this contradiction.

How does your work in the Vernal exhibition align with your larger practice?

Hon Eui Chen

By a Breath of the Morning depicts a mountain landscape with jolting blue stitches to translate parts of the mountains. This piece allowed me to explore colors that do not come natural to me.

Christy Gast

Bog Skirt feels very aligned with my larger practice because it brings together research, textile structure, deep time, and scale in one object. It began with an archeological drawing of an ancient string skirt and my curiosity about twist, the foundational gesture of textile making. I recreated and enlarged the form using plied cordage made from salvaged knitwear, then dyed it in a tannic walnut bath to bring the acid dye colors into conversation.

I was thinking about preservation, decay, and what survives in the archeological record. Like much of my work, it moves between body and landscape, garment and sculpture, past and present. It’s materially rigorous but also a little excessive.

Emily Pettigrew

A Blacksmith Courted Me is a more ephemeral, gestural piece than the typical body of work I produce. Generally I work on wood and with very precise underdrawings. This piece explores the themes I like with more of a sense of humor.

Hai Zhang

My work in the exhibition is part of my larger project situated in the Catskill Mountains. The work reflected the process of my practice – started from taking photographs intuitively and collecting experiences. I have always been interested in where a photograph can lead us. When I photographed trees and forests, I began wondering about the time before and after the moment the image was taken.

Before I felt the impulse to manipulate these photographs, my friend, my son, and I created several sculpture projects in the woods. These constructions were highly time- and site-specific. Witnessing how those pieces responded to the natural environment inspired me to intervene in my photographs.

rocki swiderski

these paintings span a few years of time. night mare (dream horse) feels like a directive while dry river used to run (rillito) feels like a diary entry. this complicated world, so heart-wrenching, yet i can only see as far as the furthest mountain or the most distant electrical cable poles and at times i learn the most from looking at what’s right in front of me.

Molly Smith

My work in Vernal has helped me mark the return I've made again and again to landscape and feels like a relaunching of myself as an artist and a reestablishment of my practice. When represents a way I work that is personal and autobiographical. I made it over the year I was pregnant with then delivered my second child, my son. I had worked in a similarly journalistic method in my work, Seasoned which coincided with my pregnancy and then birth of my daughter three years before, and this show includes several pieces from that body of work. Both use the landscape as subject but were also a record for me of that time and process.

Stephen Hendee

New Hydra imagines the fallen industrial world we engineered, becoming the waterlogged and plastic rich substrate for a feeding dark enlightenment being, a living fountainhead without a master, our world returning to its primal, pre-human landscape but with only life forms humankind created surviving.

The initial concepts around these drawings stemmed from my exploration in VRML coding of vectorized surfaces in virtual space. As these drawings scaled up and my skill improved, I started to make connections with various narratives in tech culture that I had resonated with, such as the advent of nanotechnology as visualized by Eric K. Drexler through his text “Engines of Creation” (1986). Greg Bear uses his science fiction novel Blood Music (1985) to describe scientists accidentally exposing the world to the effects of a biological AI, which erases everything it touches in exchange with the living rhizomatic crystalline structures of the new entity.

Grace Hager

Mirage started as an oil painting that depicts a red fox passing between a stand of trees. It's timed at sunset, and so it's this compilation of moments that I find exciting or awesome or awe-inspiring layered together to try and create an image that's even more impactful.

I had originally thought of it as a stand of birch trees, so it began in winter and moved into a spring palette. At that point in the studio I was taking pictures of the sunset every day. That is an ever-current motif in my work, a connection between color and light. It's a moment in the natural landscape where there is a super-saturated color that could create the kind of emotional, awe-inspiring feelings that I hope my work also taps into.

Halsey Rodman

The Wind at Night (B) is part of a group of three pieces all called The Wind at Night. This title comes from thinking about the constant wind across the desert land near Joshua Tree. I’ve spent a lot of time out there over the last decade of so because of my long-term project, Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, which is located in an area called Gamma Gulch. The landscape there is relatively arid, with low, scrubby vegetation amongst the rocks and sand. The wind blows continuously; the geology is completely still but the plants vibrate, a constant hum of oscillation blanketing the surface of the land, a constant shiver of very slight difference.

I like to think of the wind at night blowing across the rocks and plants, and the way the plants are there, vibrating in the breeze, all the time, whether someone’s there to see them or not. There’s a continuity to this presence, a weight to it, that gets outside of human time and at the same time it’s so corporeal, the pulse of the breeze, the movement of leaves in that constant wind, what you feel on your skin when you’re there, a kind of breath.