The Biophiliam loves any excuse to get nerdy. We've hosted some wild one off research residencies that don't fit into any of our usual categories, like the week we spent creeping into 31 abandoned buildings. Or the 2 weeks we spent learning about foraging and wildcrafting.

You can check out those artists here.
Click on images for more info

Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Liz Guertin, Columbia, MD

My mission in life is to connect people to the outdoors. To foster that connection so that we may protect wild places. It's been the defining purpose in my work as an outdoor leader, teacher, activist, and now, as an artist. While I'm new to art, I am not new to the inspiration, or to the daily pursuit of wild experiences.

With respect to photography, I've spent the last year on a serious, daily effort to photograph birds in their natural surroundings. Learning about light, bird behavior, songs, calls, aperture, shutter speed, and my own personal vision has given me a new perspective on the natural world. And now, as my work turns more abstract, I’m focused on capturing the essence of birds and their habitat -- to present something others want to experience. My work is at its best when it contains a mix of the literal, the mysterious, and my wonder, all at the same time.

Building this project over the last year has been a life-force for me and my community. Through such a difficult time, we can find connection in the beauty of the wild things in our own backyards. I can't bring the people to wild places, so I bring the wild places to the people.

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

Alyssa Roggow, Great Falls, Montana

When I was three, migrating monarchs came to rest on the linden tree in my parents’ backyard, and for a single magical afternoon the tree shimmered, a black-and-orange kaleidoscope of butterflies. I spent the rest of my childhood waiting for them to return.

Migration is a normal part of life for a monarch, but I was overcome with wonderment and grief at the brief transformation of my familiar surroundings. My work as a musician, writer, and composer arises from a deep awe of unexpected encounters with “the Other”, and seeks to honor the vivid emotions and sensory experiences that arise in such moments. I am inspired by natural systems and phenomena, and my creative process continually morphs to meet the environments, materials, and subjects of the work on their own terms, so I can listen more closely to what they are trying to say.

Jeff Mann, Montreal, Canada

Working across drawing, animation, video, textiles, and ceramics, Jeff Mann’s work engages with notions and feelings of sensuality, movement, and abstraction - seeking to convey that which is beyond purely immanent experience and understanding. Inspired by various historical sources of
symbols and symbolic thinking, his work abstracts images of nature, the body, light, colour, and geometric forms into compositions and films that are aesthetically numinous and spiritually yearning.

Each project starts with a spontaneous feeling, desire, gesture, or image that is then investigated and improvised upon throughout the process of making. Mann is attracted to natural foraging practices. Making his own inks, dyes, and photo developers from foraged plants, and searching the landscape for video footage and field recordings for his film collages, he sees working with natural materials a form of communion with nature. Through his work, he refers to subjects like the projective growth patterns of plants, sensory systems of flora and fauna, various historical theories of colour, and a sense of connection with the more-than-human world. His work is an invitation to explore a worldview of interconnection between nature, spirit, and the body.

Annie Thibault, Gatineu, Quebec

Inspired by an aesthetic in wich art, science, and nature overlap, her multi-disciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. By making use of the tools and technical resources of biological research laboratories and learning centres, she embraces organic matter itself as an artistic material, distilling it into a universe imbued with mystery. Her interest for the underground growth networks of mushrooms as interconnected ecological systems has led her to create works that in some ways question, both scientifically and artistically, the sensitivity of non-human life forms and the resilience of nature.

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.

Maria L Schechter, Carmel, Indiana

T6DH stands for The Six Directions of Healing. An accident provided me an opportunity to explore my inner architecture. I looked to the natural world to aid my healing process. The use of 6 healing modalities, which include diet, complementary, alternative, and integrative approaches to health offered me a second chance at life. In addition to the many surgeries on my arms and hands, I looked to the natural world for alternative remedies in relieving pain. Utilizing natural properties found in the plant and fungi kingdoms, such as turning to a more conscious diet, utilizing teas such as reishi and turkey tail mushrooms, and shifting to a more responsible worldview provided a radical recovery in health and wellbeing. The experience offered me the opportunity to ask how can I be more fully alive, and how can I show gratitude for the offerings of the plant and fungi kingdoms who have aided my recovery? In a recent discussion hosted online by Orion Magazine and Yale School of Forestry: "The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Kathleen Dean Moore and Alison Hawthorne Deming,” I learned all creations share the urge to live. They hold an urgency to protect the plants, animals, and environment which continue to provide us with its generous offerings. Understanding that we are all a part of something much larger than human life is how I find reverence for the natural world at the centerpiece of each work I now create.

Leap Second
2016/2017

And sometimes, mysteriously,
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved Where both deliberate, the love is slight: from the whitehearted water and when we touch As clover’s breath! 
In grass or sand,
But for the lovers, their arms
Who could discern when love was over.

Love Poem Explosion 
Krishan Mistry

As we rang in what looked to be a rather tumultuous new year, I was reminded of the old adage ‘Love Conquers All’ (or at least my Facebook newsfeed continued to remind me that we ‘just need more love in this world’). As a poet, I knew that I had a powerful tool of the erotic at my disposal: the love poem. Unfortunately, the residency that I had found my way into only provided me with 1 second to fix the world’s problems with a moving lyric of passionate desire. In fact, as I began to consider the possibilities of computer generation to solve my time related issues, I figured that I might as well take the quantity over quality approach so as to inject the world with as much love as I could. In my one second, I was able to produce over 400,000 love poems for my project, “Love Poem Explosion.”

The algorithm is fairly simplistic and the result of a happy accident that occurred when I was playing around with n-grams. Initially, I had compiled a corpus of preexisting love poems with the hope that a basic ngram model would produce interesting output. It did not. Later I was testing an extremely simple tool which would allow you to combine lines from different poems in a random order. I tested this tool on the love poem corpus and received 10 random lines. The results were surprisingly successful (most likely because these more archaic love poems used similar rhymes schemes and meter). I rewrote my original python script in C so it was as fast as possible and ran the program for 1 seconds. It produced 4526865 lines, a 153mb plain text file.

Vestiges
October 2016

Alia Shahab, Alberta

I investigate the unique relationships that people form with a specific place through their habitation. I create large-scale site-specific installations using natural and found materials offered by the environment that are meant to trigger interactions between people themselves and with their sense of that place - past, present, or future. I spend as much time as possible immersed within the particularities of a specific place to develop a relationship with it. The people and animals I may interact with through that immersion have fostered their own relationships with that space and together we add an important layer to that conceptual landscape. We are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the spaces we inhabit, overlaying traces of the past onto present and future functions of that environment.

Rosalind Lowry, Ireland

I am a public artist, making site specific based work with groups of people and communities or collaborations with other Artists working in different disciplines, using whatever visual means and materials are suited to the project.
I am particularly interested in land art, and community involvement in the creation of artworks, and have collaborated with several artists on large scale works such as the Art Maze – a site specific work for an annual Agricultural Show.
Materials play an important role in my work, experimenting with natural materials, textiles, paper, paint and printmaking, pushing materials and understanding what they do. I am particularly interested in textiles as a material, with its fragile properties and possibilities.
Working in a rural area has a huge influence on my work and I am mainly interested in taking art to unexpected and unusual places, and using art to create a sense of place, or a shared space. This has particular relevance to Northern Irelands’ divided society.
With a long history of political and paramilitary influence on public art in Northern Ireland I am interested in using traditional techniques and systems but with shared outcomes for the whole community and using art to build community relations

Merena Nguyen, Australia

Since completing an Honours degree at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), sculptural ceramics and installation have become my passions. My practice reveals my experimental manner where I combine abandoned furniture with special effects and prosthetics. The SCA faculty and its rich history as a psychiatric hospital (formerly known as the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane) have strongly influenced my practice and attitudes towards my conceptual and site-specific practices.

My works concentrate on notions of uncomfortable issues and anxieties in the contemporary age and its intrinsic relationship to a sense of body identity. My sculptures usually investigate what viewers may claim as the banal, question what may draw them in or perhaps repel them. By using bodily forms like skin and challenging viewers with the unfamiliar, I continually endeavor to reflect this link between attraction and repulsion through surreal installations. The significant feminist surrealists, Gothic literature and the psychological influence of space will continue to be explored in my body of work. There is no doubt that the opportunity to experience, gain insightful knowledge and visions, and networking from the unique Vestiges residency will greatly inspire my ongoing practice and research.

Jody Brooks, Georgia
http://english.gsu.edu/profile/jody-brooks/

My current work uses prose poetry to explore abandoned buildings, ruined landmarks, and urban decay. I’m particularly drawn to the architecture we erect, venerate, abandon, and ruin. Currently, I’m at work on a collection of flash fiction and hand-drawn architectural elevations about a series of famous sites—Glastonbury Tor, Angkor Wat, the Malwiya Minaret—each of which has suffered through erosion, destruction, and deterioration.  The collection, which explores the memories of our world’s sacred places, tells an unflattering story of humanity.

 Properties of Life, my first chapbook of prose poetry, is based on the architectural theories of Christopher Alexander. His “15 Properties of Life”—principles Alexander found common to all spaces that feel “alive,” spaces that appeal to us, that draw us in and tempt us to stay—drive the image-making. According to Alexander, all “living” spaces share certain identifiable characteristics, a set of features that keep showing up, again and again. If this is true of buildings, of cities, of landscapes, it might also be true of stories. If these properties define life in physical space, and we can translate them into story form, then maybe we can create a thing that feels alive and whose life is profound, even in the face of pollution, erosion, and human wreckage.

Below Zero Winter 2015

Charlotte Smith, England

I like creating things that are Interactive and Site Specific. (And preferably raise a smile)

Nicole Valentine Rimmer, BC, Canada

An attraction to organic forms is what shapes my style, while nature is what inspires and motivates me. Elements of my work often come from a specific place, moment in time, or season that moves me to create something from it. Often a color palette jumps out from a winter landscape or lush spring forest bringing with it a shape or form that I can create out of glass or metal.

My work often stretches the limits between glass and metal. Glass can be considered a super-cooled liquid while metal is a solid. Combining both elements can often create an alchemy that moves the piece to another time or place. While glass can be fragile it can also be transformed into a solid structure that can last decades or generations. Metal, being strong and supportive, can also flow and shape itself into something completely different from its original form.

I have always been particularly drawn to snow, frozen lakes, storms and all that they bring. They take me to a childlike place inside myself where a sense of awe exists. A stark winter landscape can make one feel alone – or surrounded by nature and all its elements. Falling snow takes me to a magical place deep inside where unique and different creations come from.