We have had the pleasure of studying microscopic organisms and anything so small it's invisible to the naked eye with the following artists.

Click on images to see more about each artist.

Shelly Smith, Seatle, Washington

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.

Sylvia Meillon, Montreal, QC

Sylvia Meillon is a visual artist based in Montreal, Canada. Her work draws on underlying patterns and structures from the natural world. In urban habitats that surround her and while travelling, she observes the minutiae of a natural environment. Her paintings stem from this direct, unmediated contact and grow through research and fantasy to become fully independent life-like visual ecosystems. Through playful abstract forms she probes the processes that shape our universe and highlights both the vulnerability and resilience that define it.
Sylvia Meillon holds a BFA from Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and Switzerland and features in private collections in several countries. She was recently artist in residence at the Convento de Mértola in Portugal, a research center dedicated to the study of art, ecology and biodiversity.

Lucy Rupert, Toronto

My inspirations and artistic process as dance artist are deeply coloured by my naturalist parents: raising butterflies in our bathroom, rehabilitating hawks and owls in our garage, collecting samples of rare wildflower species.  I always have an eye on the relationship between humankind and nature.  Where does animal instinct meet the poetry of art and science? What can we discover by looking at it  through this prism?

The birth of my son has motivated me to find deeper roots for my art: how can it move through my community in a way that is visible, positive, engaging and inspiring for anyone? This is manifesting now in ideas clustered around physics, ecology and cosmology. How poetic naturalism (the natural laws and philosophies or stories we tell about them) translates into a visceral moving beast, how dance performance can cause all participants to resist cynicism, to consider and care more.

I am so inspired by the gorgeousness of human accomplishments. We are capable of such cleverness and ingenuity, surely we can solve and heal where we’ve damaged and neglected. I want to be part of that process, connecting ideas, sensations, filtering it through dynamic, imaginative bodies to offer some thought-provoking spark.

I don’t know if I’m doing that, yet, but I’m trying. After 20 years of making and dancing, there is so much more to learn.

Shirley Hamilton, Winona, MS 

I explore the external as well as the internal landscape of the earth as well as the body. The end product reveals much of the process of creation just as we ourselves reveal the process of our life. I reveal some things under layers while obscuring others. Maps of Mississippi and additional imagery are layered in my work as a reference to where I live and grew up as well as the journey I've taken through my life. My newest series explores the landscape of the Tallahatchie National Wildlife Refuge as well as my home. I have been researching ways to incorporate microscopic views of samples, particularly samples of the soil, water, and plant materials to include imagery of these as part of the layers of my paintings. Just as important as the process and layers of paint are, the mark making itself fascinates me. I want the mark to reveal as much as it can about the subject be it a person or even an abstract suggestion of an emotion. Through it all, art is an intuitive process for me. My art is an extension of me and the way I see the world around me.

Linda Staiger, Palmyra, VA

My work as an artist focuses on the connection between humans and nature, and more specifically the integration we can feel as living beings when we are in nature.  My participation in the outdoors includes kayaking, backpacking and gardening.  In my work, I try to capture those moments of beauty and mystery that I feel.  Because of my training, I am grounded in physical form and,  therefore, my work is in the genre of realism, attempting to direct the viewer’s attention onto the natural world in which they might be observing or participating in.    

My undergraduate work was in physiologic psychology, which focuses on the relationships between living structure and mechanisms and the sensing, feeling, actions and interactions of beings.  

I use a number of media, including print-making, drawing and ceramics, but primarily work as an oil painter. 

Allison McElroy, Jacksonville, AL

Allison McElroy is a Professor of Art at Jacksonville State University. She received her M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. During her graduate studies, McElroy traveled to Lacoste, France where she studied on-site installation under Dr. Friedhelm Mennekes; renowned curator, professor and author. McElroy’s artistic interests lie in an exploration of ecosystems, natural processes and materials. Her research focuses on explorations of creating with everyday materials such as dirt and spiderwebs, to push the boundaries of ‘high art’; that which is exhibited in museums. Her artistic techniques include: mixed media, sound recordings, and on site installations using native materials collected from the area. JSU provides McElroy with an outdoor classroom, to teach “Art and Science Observations”, and “Biodesign”, where students focus on merging art and science together in a way to bring awareness to contemporary environmental issues.

Iris Kiewiet, Wakefiled, Qc

Iris Kiewiet, Dutch-Canadian artist, moved to Wakefield, Quebec from Rotterdam in 2006. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in The Netherlands.

With a BFA in illustration from the Arts Academy Minerva in Groningen, she drew editorials in the Dutch national newspaper, and for many other publishers.

Her contemporary style in drawing and painting feature colour and natural patterns in combination with human elements. What connects someone deeply to life is a recurring theme in her work.

Kiewiet paints and draws from her studio at PAF-FAS in Farrellton. She has worked with many community groups and offers art classes.

 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.

I am planning to be on sabbatical from my current teaching position at Idaho State University next Fall 2021. As part of my sabbatical, I have reached out to collaborate with two algae biologists. Both scientists have enthusiastically agreed to guide me through their research and work with me, my goal is to use my painting as a way to communicate their research. I have studied botany and plant physiology on my own and this research has been incorporated into my work.

Iri Berkleid, Paris, France

My life is a field of experimentation and my art is a tool of negotiation between my imaginary life and the exterior. From the conception to the physical production, I produce everything by hand. I organize, disorganize, shape, reshape, destroy, rebuild, displace, cut, mark, move, assemble and disassemble my pieces while maneuvering their constant transformation. As the primary matter of these objects remains the same, their various manifestations mimic the relational plasticity of our living world. Hence, they are marked by the visual codes of what is not visible to the naked eye - the living tissue that binds us all in this mysterious, microscopic and impermanent cellular danse.

Through this same game of relational plasticity, I transform myself as my physical works change. I am a metal worker welding in a metal factory one day, I am a filmmaker collaborating with actors and dancers another, painter or sculptor, costume designer or photograph, sociologist, biologist or psychoanalyst. The systems of all these disciplines are like processes machines shaping the primary matter of my work: dreams, visions, perceptions.

More than resolutions, my artworks offer potentialities of narratives and opportunities of representation, both generated by a fertile psychic activity.

Sarah Logan, Fort Bragg, CA

My sculptures are vessels for caching personal stories and establishing connections with the past and the future. I cherish the intimate details and still moments punctuating my busy existence, but their clarity can be fleeting. A weeping Calla Lilly outside my studio door, a decomposing whale swept up from the sea, the slowly eroding granite needles from my home in the Black Hills--these things feel like metaphors for experiences and reminiscences dulled by the passage of time. By creating mementos and souvenirs to document my experiences, I seek to give form to my memories, distilling them to their essence and preserving them against decay.

Camille Kravitzch, Basel, Switzerland

Eveline Kolijn, Calgary, Alberta

The sea permeated my upbringing in the Caribbean. Now I am living in Alberta, where the sea is a memory, an ancient fossil bed high in the mountains. It holds a history of evolution: life emerging, harnessing sunlight and creating the breathing oceans that give us oxygen. Revisiting the places of my childhood, I have witnessed the shocking degradation of coral reefs as a result of the ocean’s changing chemistry. This set me on the course of reading on evolutionary theory and micro-biology, systems thinking and climate change with creating visual art inspired by this thinking, mostly in the realm of printmaking, small installations and recently, video.

Everything is connected through a web called the Biosphere. I am fascinated with the concept of the Noösphere, defined by Vladimir Vernadsky hundred years ago as the mental sphere of life; the capacity of human thought to change the Biosphere. Now, we call this outcome the Anthropocene: the epoch of human impact on ecosystems, including climate change.

As an artist, I practise making-thinking. What does it mean to be an artist in the age of the Anthropocene? How do we become ecologically intelligent? The Anthropocene challenges human exceptionalism. We must come to a fundamental understanding we are a porous organism, a Human Holobiont, with microbial kin and symbiotic relationships in a living world. To me, the web of life is most poignant and beautiful at the micro-level, which is why I am attracted to make visible the invisible; to inspire and create awareness of this connection.

Erin L Kuhn, Tempe, Arizona

Moving to Arizona has made me rethink the meaning of home. It’s the people here, that really changed my perception on appreciating the land we walk on and a respecting people with their different cultures. For a long time, I had been misinterpreting my own homelessness. In a sense of emotional displacement, I have always been homeless. Now, a place of residency is not a home. It is a clinical reference of a person’s applied location, but a Home is an external imprint onto the internal.

In my work, I collect memory from where I have walked, by attaching Printmaking plate to my feet and walking on them. The abused surfaces of the printing plates are a narration of the external and internal homeless journey. This organic/abstract poetry is then formulated into a prosses of discover and translated into a confliction of scientific language. The formulated process has the most relatable translation of Aboriginal Dream Lines and Mapmaking.

My work is something that is not easily to come to terms with for everyone. It is the nature of its play on perception, and the act upon human emotional experience that questions a person’s life journey up to that given point in time. What is given in my work, is the conviction of being lost or found.

Jen Urso, Phoenix, Arizona

My practice has always revolved around subtleties of environments and behavior as well as attempting to undo the constructs expected to be necessary to take part in an artwork. I like looking at the details. I like the idea that there is always something more complex, if we just take the time and attention to notice it. The process of awareness and investigation steers us away from the allure of a spectacle to discover something possibly more intimate and vulnerable. In a public setting where we’re drawn to be distracted, I create stumbled-on moments of focus with ephemeral materials or performance. In a gallery setting that already encourages hyper-awareness, I create an up-closeness or near invisibility so the work can be ignored or experienced intimately. I want to show that there is always more to the dazzling surface and that the “more” part is what makes us interesting, inquisitive creatures.

Dawn George, Hammonds Plains,
Nova Scotia

www.dawngeorge.com/

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.

Twyla Nova, Duncanville, Texas

My artwork incorporates various photographic processes. Although each series explores a
different concept, the underlying theme throughout is our complex relationship to the natural
world. Through investigating representations of nature whether this be domestic spaces, artistic
practices, scientific imagery, educational institutions, or as commodity. Included in this
application are pieces are from the series Trace Farewell, The Photo Lark, and Specimen. The first
two series focus on representations of endangered species. Trace Farewell appropriates
illustrations of endangered species published in the early 70s while The Photo Lark appropriates
current photographs taken of endangered species as a means of archiving species before their
extinction much like the mission of many contemporary zoos to house species extinct in the wild
referred to as “the ark.” Although many photographs of endangered species are created with the
intention of promoting preservation, they also exemplify Roland Barthes notions in Camera
Lucida of the “trauma of separation, loss, and death” as experienced through
photography. These iconic images may one day be nothing more than indexical traces of their
extinct referents. The last series Specimen emulates the aesthetic qualities of scientific imagery
using domestic subjects, circular crops, and inverted colors referencing specimens as seen
through a microscope.

2018

Field Expeditions

Jenna Buckingham, Philadelphia

I am a visual artist living in Philadelphia. I have enjoyed the adventurous life of a transplant since age 13, but it has given me a strange perspective on the idea of home. It seems that the creation of home is both desperate and idealistic. We make shelter with clumsy hands and unsure technique. But the flaws in these structures do open a space for desire. My work has a couple different manifestations. Through two dimensional pieces, enlarged photographic collages mix portions of generic and personal imagery, contending with the viewer’s orientation. Through three-dimensional works, objects and photographs meet in unexpected ways. The work usually involves the manipulation of regular household materials to create odd shapes, playing on the threshold between confusion and recognition.

Shelly Smith, Seatle

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.

I’m interested in the microcosmos, the unseen engine of life in our word that keeps creation digesting food, making oxygen, returning to dust, and springing forth anew. From blastocyst to decomposition bacteria, we’re all a bunch of beautiful, cycling cells.

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.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me.
Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To
be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

The imagery and symbols that come through Robyn's work encourage one's gaze inward to the cellular realms. There, one discovers playful depictions of chemical processes; they are the basis for the macrocosm, and our human consciousness becomes an interface between the seen and the unseen worlds.

In her functional ceramic work, the influence of Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony encourages moments of contemplation. The viewer-participant can loose her or his train of thought while meandering through considerately composed collages of geometries, molecules, plants, and creatures, all woven together by strands of double-helical DNA. A flash of recognition. A momentary mirror.

A goal in this work is balance and harmony between the form, and the micro-mythologies encircling it. Moments of personal ritual in daily life beget even deeper, more conscious presence. Little by little over time we gain insight into what makes us tick.

Robyn’s goal is to provide a platform (however small), on which to rest, and off of which to launch forays into the luscious and potent realms of imagination, self-inquiry, and discovery during moments of solitude and engaged contemplation. So let us celebrate alone and together!

2017

Field Expeditions

Christina La Sala, San Francisco

I am a scavenger, a collector, a researcher and a fabricator. My work is site based, performative and driven by a love of process, history and craft. I read the world as pattern and experience it as time code, reading and misreading pattern and symbol as sensory narratives and fragmented symbols.
My projects explore a relationship to time through material choice, process and kinetics:
ephemeral materials like water and wax, processes like spinning and embroidery, kinetics that employ rocking, melting and spinning, are sensory based, sequenced investigations of temporal patterns that lie hidden in our daily activities.
I have been observing the flight patterns of birds and insects as part of my ongoing investigation of pattern in natural and human systems. I am especially interested in moths; diagramming their movements through drawing, photography and journalling. The Nocturne Residency would significantly contribute to my understanding of the behavior of moths and lay the foundation for a project that interprets the temporal and physical movements of moths in flight. The art work will develop over several years as a series of textiles and sculptures.

Kay Hartung, USA

My work is related to my fascination with the microscopic world. I have been looking at electron microscope photographs and am inspired by the abstract organic shapes and intense color of this hidden world. I imagine the energy and interactions that go on in the body and the mind to produce action and thought. I am exploring the connections between science and art ; conscious of the profound effects that these minute biological forms have on the universe.
The imagery, loosely based on observation of biological structures, explores the interconnections of these cellular forms. The process builds layer upon layer suggesting growth, development and movement. Some of the pieces are in more of a static or restful stage whereas others explode with activity. The order and chaos of these biological processes are captured in my imagery.

Using my own reality as a starting point I make work that aims to act as a vehicle for reverie, provoking questions on issues born through my experiences but not singularly specific to me. Primarily I am concerned with illness, it's physicality and it's emotional impact. I aim to confront ones innate response to certain subject matter, using visuals so expected connotations are subverted. Play between the objective and the personal is prevalent. Presenting the first contradiction in a line of many that are central to my practice.
The morbid and the poetic. Beauty and abjectness. Attraction and repulsion. 
Exploring imagery we cannot usually see, revealing what to the human eye is ugly/abject but under the microscope is beautiful. Making the internal, external. In doing so bringing something that is usually out of sight, into view. Balancing which personal elements to reveal and which to conceal so my work can remain both ambiguous and specific, scientific and dactylic.

My work explores Terrestrial manifestations through combining tactile, sculptural forms, and audio; creating immersive environments, unNatural History Dioramas, and performative, wearable structures questioning Human origin and mythos.

My ‘jewelry’ serves as maquettes and experiments towards my sculptural work. The majority of my work draws from my fascination with the artistic representation of natural history, the creation of fictitious places in literature and my interest in Cordyceps fungus – in particular; Cordyceps unilateralis, a species of entomopathogenic fungus that infects and alters the behaviour of ants in order to ensure the widespread distribution of its spores.
The body of work, An unNatural History created for Urban Glass Brooklyn and featured during SOFA, NY 2009 is an example of this passion to bring the microcosmos to the macro through metal, glass, mixed/multi-media, often 'wearable' maquettes.

If we can say that the world of science is synonymous with truth and the world of art with that of fiction, I want to tread a middle ground that is unusual and seemingly beyond belief, yet also familiar.