Rainey Straus, Blown Away, 5 x 10 feet, acrylic and watercolor on Yupo paper, 2022

The following pieces were developed for a public event in conjunction with the Old Growth Project, shown at Marin MOCA over the spring/summer of 2024. The gathering combined an artist talk by Rainey Straus with movement exploration led by Aline Wachsmuth to explore the creative process behind the painting series and somatically experience the life cycle of a Redwood tree.

Thinking with the Trees

Rainey Straus, June 17, 2024

The Old Growth Project

The Old Growth Project started with a walk in the woods, specifically in Prairie Creek and Redwood National Parks up north in Humbolt County. But truthfully, this project started more than 30 years ago when I moved to California. Although I’ve spent many years here enjoying the great outdoors — I’ve never become “of this place,” I’ve stayed on the beautiful surface. So core to this investigation is my desire to grow more intimate with my home — to inhabit this specific place, especially as the climate changes before my eyes.

The paintings in this show are essentially artifacts of a relationship-building practice. They may appear “tree-like,” but they also hold all the stories, experiences, and learnings that emerged over the past two years of research and making. These paintings carry multiple questions, grief, loss, and tremendous awe and wonder.

At the end of the day, as Robin Wall Kimmer speaks to so beautifully in Braiding Sweetgrass, this project is an effort to become kin to the beings I share space with.

The Importance of Stories

This notion of narrative or story is very important to me in framing this work. The thinking of so many writers has nourished the Old Growth Project. Still, related to story, I look to the work of Jeremy Lent (The Patterning Instinct), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), Indigenous scientist/scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk, Right Story/Wrong Story) to guide my thinking.

From this research, I take away three critical concepts:

The First:
Stories are the foundation of culture; they hold the values that drive our actions and behaviors. Stories can be held in the land.

Second:
We are entrenched in the “wrong story,” a story of separation, extraction, monoculture, and human dominance.

I think we all know the outcomes of this story, so I won’t go deeply into what is not news to any of you.

Third:
We need to live from different stories, diverse stories, new stories that incorporate the wise use of modern technologies, ancient stories that model the right relationship with the more-than-human world, and stories that reflect care and reciprocity.

Continue reading here

100th IUSS Soil Congress and Il Conventino Pop-up, A Report from Florence, Italy by Patricia Watts

This trip to Italy was three years in the making, meeting monthly for our Soil Dialogues Zoom sessions. With over 100 ecoartspace members who are interested in soils, during the last year and a half, twenty-seven of them decided to take an active role in responding to a provocation to bury textiles in soil as an aesthetic and scientific inquiry. Our in-house soil scientist and artist, Rhonda Janke, shared this textile burial method with our Dialogues and offered to do DNA testing for some of the burial sites. Alexandra Toland, co-editor of Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (2018) and curator of Gaia Glossary, included in We Are Compost / Composting the We at Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow (2022), suggested that participants could present their findings at the celebration of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) 100th Soil Congress, in Florence, Italy (May 2024).

Over last summer and fall, ten of our members prepared papers to present at this special 100th Soil Congress, they buried their textiles, then transported them to Italy for a pop-up exhibition at Il Conventino. The former monastery, which Jo Pearl from London, found for us through a friend, was perfect for our needs. By January 2024, we were scheduling flights and finding hostels, hotels and Airbnbs for our week in Firenze. Some arrived early to go to Venice for the Biennale, others waited until after the conference to check out “the Olympics of the art world,” this year titled Foreigners Everywhere. The congress began Sunday, May 19, for three consecutive days, kicking-off with 1,400 attendees from around the world. For several of us, it was about a 25-minute walk one way to the Palazzo Dei Congressi near the train station. Luckily, there were gelaterias along the way to keep us cool.

The three-day congress was jam-packed with incredible opportunities to attend sessions where you could learn everything from black soils to soil regeneration, soil health indicators, and more. There was a soil literacy session where communication and community engagement were discussed. Author and presenter Nikola Patzel, who wrote the book “Cultural Understanding of Soils,” presented a “soil vision” by Hildegard of Bingen, painted in the 12th century. The vision was included in Bingen’s manuscript “Liber Divinorum Operum,” completed in 1174, which conveyed her ideas about the universe and is preserved in the State Library of Lucca in Italy. There was a session on mulching that addressed prototyping alternatives to plastic films used in vegetable production to reduce tillage and suppress weeds. These films are made with biopolymers rather than fossil fuels and can also serve to release fertilizers, though they are not yet commercially available. There was a session on anthropogenic soils and information on a mass worm death in India due to increasing temperatures. Other member favorites included a session on the soil microbiome gut-fecal connection, and understanding how climate change is affecting soil conditions for growing food. And, there was an experiment presented where warmer climate inside a biosphere was monitored to see how it would affect peat fields.

The majority of the humanities sessions were scheduled for Tuesday, the last day of the congress, and most of our participants presented in the final time slot. A few of us set up the Soil Dialogues pop-up exhibition in the morning, installing over fifty works by thirty artists in three hours. We were situated in a ceramics studio, where we used drying racks to hang textiles from, invented hanging devices from the tops of temporary walls and over window shutters, and laid several works on a long turquoise table placed on squares of Kraft paper with corresponding numbers on dots that matched printed checklists in both English and Italian.

At noon, at the Palazzo dei Congressi, the soil work of Italian artist Samantha  Passanti was presented by contemporary art critic and curator Davide Silvioli who discussed her work immersing fabrics in a rich ochre pigment found in soils at a former Sienna quarry in Bagnoli, which operated from the late 1700s to the 1800s. His talk, titled "Oltreterra Art Project: Artistic, cultural, environmental and cross-disciplinary project on Raw Sienna,” was included in the session titled “Soil, soul and society: transformative pathways in soil care practices.”

Alexandra Toland presented on three panels on Tuesday, including “The Sky Inside the Soil,” which is a multi-phase, co-authored, research-creation project developed by Toland and Caroline Ektander that explores the rhizosphere as a place of trans-mediation in an environment of extreme toxicity. Toland also presented for the “Epistemologies and Ontologies of Soil: Towards New Politics of Soil Knowledge” panel, her paper titled “Soil Personhood, on the possibility of ped-ontological protection of soil beings and livelihoods,” and for the “Soil, Soul and Society: Transformative Pathways in Soil Care Practices” panel, she presented a new publication project in the making, the “Language of Soil” with Anna Krzywoszynska.

Rhonda Janke, Deanna Pindell, Jwan Ibbini and Patricia Watts convened and moderated a session titled “Soil Health from Multiple Perspectives,” which was presented in two separate panels in the rooftop Belvedere room with an incredible view of Florence. The first panel included Janke’s introduction to “A brief history of the buried cotton cloth assay use in science and art and current comparisons of diverse sites using metagenomic indicators.” She also unfurled a long data set on the DNA soil testing sampled from the participants located between Oman, Europe and the U.S. Pindell presented “Burial Shroud: a multispecies and ecofeminist perspective on human/microbial relationships in soil fertility and decomposition, as expressed through art.” She also presented Allie Horick’s Soil Quilt, made of soils from fourteen of her families’ ancestral cemeteries and patterned after her great-grandmother’s quilts.

This was followed by Ibbini’s talk titled “Buried Cloth Technique: Soil Microbial Art as a Teaching Tool for Laboratories.” With her students they conducted experiments by adding toxic substances, and sugar to the fabric before burial, which accelerated decomposition and affected resulting colors. The concluding panel was “Two Painters’ Collaboration with Soil, A Search for Understanding,” presented by Andrea Bersaglieri who shared watercolors on paper by Pamela Casper, featuring colorful underground worlds with circular insets of buried fabric on which she embroidered microbial life. The works mimic a microscopic view and channel generations of women’s work, typically undervalued—analogous to the way soil life has been undervalued. Bersaglieri also presented her paintings and drawings of clumps of soil on the soiled textiles, incorporating inks made from organic matter found within the soil buried in the artists’ backyard garden, in Los Angeles, California.

For the second session on “Soil Health from Multiple Perspectives,” I gave a brief history titled “Ecological artists engaging soils as both medium and non-human collaborator,” including Italian Arte Povera artists Peno Pascali and Giovanni Anselmo and post-war painter and farmer Gianfranco Baruchello, as well as several early American artists working with soils, and the buried textiles of ecoartspace member participants unable to attend, participants of the Soil Dialogues. Anne Yoncha presented the sound work of Kim V. Goldsmith and her own sound work in a talk titled “Sound of Soils: Two approaches to a multisensory understanding of soil.” She outlined how they each used different processes to explore their respective soil microbiome communities and shared the resulting sounds. Next was Jo Pearl, who presented Cindy Stockton Moore’s experimental short video Refuge in dialog with her own film Unearthed for the panel titled “Animating Soil Health: Breathing Life into Soil, Campaigning through Stopmotion Film.” She highlighted the origins and meaning of the practice of animation, defending its dynamic ability for bringing the hidden soil biome to life.

Three scientific posters were also presented, displayed around the perimeter of the main lecture hall for the duration of the congress (a strategy more ecoartists should be participating in at science conferences). Saskia Jorda illustrated her buried cloth experiment at two locations in Arizona, and included shoes or slippers with attached “mycelial roots'' sprouting from the bottoms, which she made from the textiles buried near her home. Her slippers and the poster titled “Rooted: soil health and memory of place,” were displayed at Il Coventino following the congress. Another collaborative poster by Anne Yoncha titled “Suon Laulu (Song of the Swamp): Soil Data Sonification of Post-Human Landscapes,” presented data from a graphic score, choral performance, and programmed video visualization that sonified 160 years of soil data from post-extracted peatlands in Finland. And, Ibbini’s daughter, Nada Hatamleh, from Oman, summarizing both historic and contemporary use of soil for design and construction in her poster titled “Harbony beneath our structure: bridging sustainable architecture and soil science in a changing world.”

During the same time, in another area of the Palazzo dei Congressi, Maru Garcia presented her talk, “Under the Concrete: Explorations of Soil Biodiversity through Art and Science in the Los Angeles River,” a multi-year large-scale project led by Lauren Bon + Metabolic Studio in California. Garcia has been a Metabolic Studio Fellow for the last two years, and presented this project in the session titled “Soil sciences entering into transdisciplinary research.” Bon sent six microscopic images of microbial soil organisms found in the river, printed on colorful textiles, which were hung on cordage up high diagonally across the ceramics room at Il Conventino. Garcia also displayed postcards from her project Prospering Backyards, which has provided free soil testing for lead to residents of Los Angeles County.

After the presentations, and after passing out flyers in both English and Italian at the Palazzo Dei Congressi for our Soil Dialogues pop-up exhibition, we rushed back to Il Conventino to welcome the soil scientists. For three hours, we had a full house of rotating guests. We were lucky that the venue had a cafe adjacent to the ceramics studio, where visitors could also get dinner. There was also a large courtyard where visitors continued conversing on the power of art to create an aesthetic context for discussion on soils.

Other artists in the pop-up included: from Australia, printed images of burials and exhumation of soiled textiles by Annette Nykiel, Renata Buziak and a quilted banner by Cassandra Tytler. From the US, unaltered buried textiles by Ashton Phillips along the Los Angeles River, and by Ruth Wallen four textiles from two different sites to measure soil health post-fire restoration in California, and a piece of buried Birch tree bark composed into an artwork by Stephanie Garon; remaining threads from a vermicomposted America flag by Christopher Lin; a painted textile by Priscilla Stadler mapping the area near Newtown Creek, in New York City where she buried her fabric; a degraded soiled embroidered textile with a nematode, juxtaposed with a printed before picture by Valerie Constantino; a monograph of bio-char on paper by Erin Wiersma; and from Canada, raw soiled fabric buried by Grace Grothaus; and a soya ink on cotton with the word soil on a dinner napkin that had been buried in roadside by Jill Price; and, from London, a recently exhumed textile with paintings of plastic forms buried in a community garden by Susana Soares Pinto; several raw soiled textiles buried in two locations by Kim Norton, and two tied canvas pieces buried with food waste or compost by Helen Elizabeth.

There was also a table with take-aways including brochures, postcards, business cards, and books for sale including Clive Adams and Daro Montag's book Soil Culture: Bring the Arts Down to Earth, Samantha Passaniti's Oltreterra Art Project, and Kim V. Goldsmith's Good For Nothing Dirt & Subterranean Sernade.

Exhausted from the Congress and reception (not to mention the time change), we went back to Il Conventino the next morning at 11am to welcome local artists. And, in the afternoon, we held another reception for the participants of the Art & Soil Tour, led by the IUSS Soil Congress. Many attending scientists left Florence right after the Congress, and others went on tours in other parts of Italy. We did, however, find a few scientists who stayed longer and came to our post-congress events, including on Thursday morning, where we talked with two soil scientists about the differences between artists and scientists and their processes of observation and visualization, which we concluded were not that different.

Jo Pearl wrapped up the three-day pop-up with a clay workshop in the afternoon where we formed soil microbes based on illustrations and our imaginations to collaboratively make a sculptural 3D bacterial biome. The participants were all ecoartspace members, so we used this time to share what we had learned from the soil congress and our interactions with scientists. We discussed future plans for a book documenting this journey—our working title is “Burial Shroud: a multispecies and ecofeminist perspective on human/microbial relationships in soil fertility and decomposition, as expressed through art.” And we considered additional possibilities to do pop-ups at upcoming conferences. This led us to consider how we could execute a collaborative work–an exquisite corpse style assembly of textiles. We have already started laying out a schedule to accomplish this over the next year.

The Soil Dialogues will continue through 2024 and beyond and we are looking forward to publishing the ecoartspace annual book titled Soils Turn in 2025, a directory for curators and scientists to locate artists for exhibitions and collaborations. Soils Turn will be co-edited by myself and Dr. Alexandra Regan Toland, Professor of Art and Research at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany.

Of course, we will follow up on our contacts made during this time in Italy and look forward to more opportunities for creating new ways of seeing and engaging with soils.

Image: Listening Party, Zoë Sadokierski, 2024

Sketching Soundscapes

Wednesday 5 June, 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Waraburra Nura, Indigenous Plant Garden
L6 (balcony), Building 1, UTS

In this free workshop, Zoë Sadokierski led participants through a guided listening experience, followed by a simple soundscape sketching exercise. The activity encouraged people to slow down, listen and reflect on ways to engage with the natural world, even in a hectic urban environment.

Read full blog post with images here

Nature was quiet on World Environment Day: The Stories Behind the Silence

published June 5, 2024 by Kim V. Goldsmith

Outdoor events involving technical equipment are always a gamble. Winter announced her presence early this year in the Central West of New South Wales, cloaked in cold southerly winds, showers, and overcast days with plunging temperatures in the week leading up to World Environment Day 2024 on 5 June. Of course, I had planned an outdoor listening event for the occasion.

I was part of a program of place-based interventions across the country by members of the ecoartspace Australian Dialogues, each of us marking World Environment Day by creating hopeful actions to address the issues impacting the environments where we live and work. This is the first of a series of events we're planning over the next 12 to 18 months.

An urban setting was chosen for my Lunchtime Listening Lab event—not an environment I usually work in, or my personal preference. However, I believe an intervention requires one to go where the people are rather than expecting them to come to me. My event location was on the lawns at the front of the Western Plains Cultural Centre in the regional city of Dubbo—facing a busy street and close to the path leading into the gallery museum complex’s popular café.

To read the full post go to the artists' blog here

A Listening Ritual with Clarice Yuen, 10am AWST

@clariceyuen

#worldenvironmentday2024

This simple recording is for all earthlings to use at their leisure for reading, drawing, or meditation. This event explores the ritual of listening, moving beyond human language to embrace the subtle interactions within our everyday surroundings. For instance, garden peas communicate with their environment through nonverbal networks. Beyond our languages, we also engage in communication through smell, touch, and other sensory experiences. I will remain still in my garden, recording its soundscapes. Perhaps you can share your sound recording so I can enjoy a different corner in the earth. This event was part of an ongoing program through the ecoartspace Australian Dialogues.

#easAUSDialogue#worldenvironmentday2024#世界環境日

World Environment Day 2024 – Wed 5 June

Sound Works by Jane Richens

Thanks to all who took some time to tune into sounds of nature at the Dungog Listening Station. It was my listening action for Ecoartspace’s Australian Dialogues event ‘Place-based interventions in three time zones’ – one of 17 events across the country.

11, + Leon the dog, stopped by the Listening Station for an extended period of time – listening to and watching multiple audio and video works created in local forests. It led to many conversations about sound, nature, equipment, consequences of human interactions and how aware we are of human noise pollution. Particularly of interest were the two different passive acoustic recording devices – how they worked and what could be done with the recordings.

Read full report here

  June 2024 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

May 2024 e-Newsletter for subscribers is here

Transmissions in Austin, Texas:  ecoartspace eclipse pop-up event

Report by Patricia Watts

For our ecoartspace 2024 annual show, I worked with over twenty-five artists from across the State of Texas to create a pop-up exhibition on the weekend of the solar eclipse in early April, in the path of totality in Austin.

We’ve only had a handful of members in Texas since 2020, and since this unique celestial event was to happen there, it was an excellent opportunity to explore the work of artists making ecological work in the number one state for energy production (primarily oil) in the US. I wondered: could there be progressive Texas artists who want to make a difference? Well, the answer is definitely yes.

Jamal Hussain, a new media artist from near Austin, was in Santa Fe for the CURRENTS Festival in June 2023 and reached out for a meeting. He mentioned that he would like to gather an eco focused show. At that moment, the seed was sewn. By August, I started rounding up our then-current Texas members via Zoom. Hussain located the perfect venue for us, Canopy Austin. By the end of last year there were several new Texas members ready to contribute to the Transmissions event.

By mid-February this year, we had multiple submissions of works by 27 artists, all from Texas, except two who would travel from New York and Boston for the eclipse. Long established artists/members and Houston photographers Krista Leigh Steinke and Erika Blumenfeld were invited to select the show. At least half of the works were lens-based, along with some sculpture, painting, illustration, drawing, sound, installation and video works. With an exciting selection of moving image works, Steinke, Blumenfeld and Hussain proposed to turn the back room into the Cosmos Cinema, a darkened space with seating where visitors could watch a loop of six works under 45 minutes in length.   

The Cinema featured video works by Steinke, Blumenfeld and Hussain, also included Alyce Santoro, Virginia Lee Montgomery, and Abinati Meza. Houston photographer Jake Eshelman, who contributed two incredible “Luciforms” pigment prints of bioluminescent glow worms for the show, was invited to moderate a panel with the video artists (all except Santoro, former Texas artist now living in New Mexico), where they discussed their featured works. Eshelman stated after the show:

It was a pleasure to moderate the Cosmos Cinema panel discussion. I thoroughly enjoyed the diversity of the works at the center of our conversation, especially how the featured artists bring such different and complementary perspectives to create fascinating dialogues around our relationships to, with, and within our cosmos. In addition, I was particularly inspired by the generosity of the conversation, as panelists specifically welcomed members of the audience to weigh in with their own ideas and experiences. The atmosphere we collectively created in the room felt very in-step with the spirit during the eclipse, as millions of people in (and beyond) the path of totality took a moment to be together and consider the awe, wonder, and beauty of our world.

Margaux Crump, Houston artist who contributed two small ethereal pigment prints, also did eclipse tarot readings in the afternoon for a couple hours. When I asked if there was a reoccurring theme in her readings, Crump stated:

Unfortunately I can't speak to a theme from the readings because my readings are confidential. I can say that eclipses offer opportunities to expand our perspectives and become more conscious of our possible paths forward. Tarot is reflective: as we engage the deck, it mirrors back into us. Like the cards, we are living ecosystems whose inner worlds can be explored through image, symbol, and story. During the eclipse readings, hope spoke louder than grief.

Outdoors were hanging textile solar works by Samantha Melvin, a sound piece by Andrew Weathers, and an interactive performative solar printmaking activity led by Lubbock artist Carol Flueckiger.

The pop-up took place during Canopy’s First Saturday monthly event, which meant the place was filled with visitors. Flueckiger took advantage of the attendance and created a collaborative cyanotype in celebration of the upcoming solar eclipse. When I asked her about her expectations and the general interest of participants, Flueckiger stated:

Expectations for this interactive cyanotype demonstration were to have a shared group celebration of the eclipse by staging a mock sun/moon dynamic. The sunlight created a blue “sunburn” on a large light sensitive fabric (96 x 102 inches). Local collected rocks operated as moons, which blocked the sun from reaching the light sensitive fabric. The effect created a cosmic pattern. Toy bicycles were also added to block the sunlight. The effect was an imaginary bicycle ride through the cosmos. This narrative is a cosmic version of my mixed media bicycle prints about local daily weather forecasts. The results were as surprising and perfectly imperfect as a devised theatre production. The rocks did not disappoint in created a cosmic print. The sun, was shy in its appearance causing us to overexpose the print and lose some of the toy bicycle details. Note for future: sunlight is incredibly powerful on cloudy days. We also learned that the janitor sink at Canopy is a great place to rinse the print to fix the image. And the windy warm day dried the print as it hung on the breezeway railing.

About a dozen Participants joined in assembling or watching the rocks and bicycles. Together we watched the magical process of cyanotype chemical changing color from yellow to grey during sun exposure. We had fun celebrating the sun and moon dynamic. Our motto during the workshop was: Add Sun, Rocks, water, cyanotype and bicycles to get a cosmic bicycle path of totality. We felt connected to the sun, the moon, the sky and each other as we planned and assembled and exposed this extra-large cyanotype print. It was a great vibe.




Indoors for four thirty-minute sessions throughout the day, led by Boston artist Faith Johnson, was a somatic meditation work, Arc of Infinity: a meditation on darkness and light. Recalling the event after returning to the east coast, Johnson stated:

The first meditation and interactive installation was focused on sitting with darkness as mystery and infinite possibilities - a sort of cosmic widening of the lens of consciousness. The second floor installation and meditation was focused on light and calling in what we desire for the future - visioning with hope - from this place of possibility. This is a sort of re-focusing of the lens - the way light brings form into being from the darkness.

Both Darkness and Light meditations were beautifully attended. Each participant explored personal and collective connection and meaning to the guided meditations. During the darkness meditation one participant saw herself covered with stars, another connected with long gone relatives, and others felt contained as if in amniotic fluid. All seem to feel a gentleness to the guided visualizations. During the light meditation one participant was surprised that she felt more at peace and expansive during the darkness meditation and more anxiety around calling in the future for humanity and the earth, while another participant felt a strong, creative, and hopeful feminine energy. Each individual journey added to the richness of the group and perhaps sparked a new connection to the mystery of change as it arcs through deep time.

In the early afternoon, we welcomed Cymene Howe, Professor of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, who is co-editor of the recent publication Solarities. Howe generously gave a passionate reading and following a book signing. You can download a copy of her book, which holds a compilation of intriguing essays about the sun, for free here.

My own contribution for the event was moon spell cookies and moon milk (made with oat or almond milk with lavender simple syrup) and sun tea (made with the sun and elderberry syrup with spices). Both drinks were garnished with culinary lavender and Santa Fe bee pollen. The cookies, which were handmade (spelt and almond flour) by myself and photo-based artist DM Witman and "revealing the invisible" artist Heather L Johnson, had crushed purple basil on them, a spell for protection.


It was a full day of inspiration and conversations among eco artists who arrived from areas around Dallas, Houston, Lubbock, McAllen and Austin to participate. I kept hearing members say they felt like it was a conference of sorts. And, of course, this was Saturday, so we took down the show that night and the next morning, then everyone situated themselves around the "hill country" west of Austin to view the total solar eclipse through the cloudy skies on Monday, April 8. It is always spectacular to lose full sunlight in the middle of the day. And I know many of our members in the Midwest and Northeast were able to connect with the light and dark of the cosmos that day.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Austin photographer Elizabeth Chiles, who opened her home to everyone the night before for pizza. And to say that, I hope all of our members, in areas far and wide, feel encouraged and connected to each other for support in developing their practices to address the ecological issues at hand. I think our Texas cohort is already off and running. 

To view the entire Transmissions exhibition online, including 88 of our members, go here

Transmissions from Lisa B. Woods on Vimeo.

Forest Whisper, April 8, 2022 - present (above) is a public sound sculpture designed to amplify the rich but often unnoticed sounds of the redwood forest. The idea for this project came after learning that trees emit sounds at very low frequencies, which instilled a desire to listen and learn from them. Inspired by Erika Rothenberg’s 1984 megaphone sculpture that explores freedom of expression, Gayotto decided to make an interactive “mega-scope” that serves both as a megaphone and a naked-eye telescope, to amplify the sounds of the forest and frame its the surrounding beauty. Visitors to Gualala Arts Global Harmony Sculpture Garden in California are invited to place their ear next to the mega-scope’s small opening, close their eyes and pause for a few moments to listen to the forest. By actively listening and interpreting the forest sounds, audiences may feel a sense of peacefulness, and at the same time, reflect on their physical and spiritual connections with trees.

More than One, 2024 (below) is an experimental video installation features a group of women mushroom foragers living on the Sonoma Coast, who embody the invisible mycelia network below our feet. “More than one” means mycelium in Latin Greek, and refers to the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching root-like structure. Although invisible, mycelium plays a vital role in decomposing plant material, resisting pathogens, and absorbing water and nutrient. They also help forests absorb carbon pollution, delaying the effects of global warming, and protecting our planet. Like the fungi, women are primary caregivers, helping to care for the well-being of our communities. With an open form— including montage, animation, performance, and a readers choir— the work stimulates sensory and contemplative responses, evoking the relations between wilderness and ecofeminism, activism and desire, above and below. 

Bia Gayotto is a contemporary multimedia artist, curator and educator who lives/works in The Sea Ranch and Los Angeles, California. Her interdisciplinary practice includes photography, video installations, and books, and combines elements of documentation, fieldwork, performance and collaboration. Gayotto earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996 and her work has been featured in many exhibitions nationally and internationally including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Pasadena Museum of California Art; Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA); Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Breeder Project, Athens, and Museum of Image and Sound, São Paulo, Brazil. She has been the recipient of several awards such as the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A) Fellowship, Investing in Artists Grant from Center for Cultural Innovation, Artists' Resource for Completion grants, and Individual Artist Grant from the Pasadena Cultural Affairs. She has participated in artistic residencies worldwide including the Banff Centre, Canada; “Threewalls” in Chicago; AIR Taipei, Taiwan; Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga and the Sacatar Institute, Bahia, Brazil. To further her investigations Gayotto has curated several projects, including exhibitions including her most recent “Bahia Reverb: Artists & Place” co-organized by the California African American Museum and Art + Practice in Los Angeles. Gayotto has taught at California State University, Los Angeles, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and University of Southern California, Los Angeles.www.biagayotto.com

Image captions (top to bottom): ©Bia Gayotto, The Tower Apartments #4: Do you vote?, 2003, archival pigment photographs, set of seven, 17 3/4 x 40 inches each, made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division; The Sea Is Not Blue / O Mar Não é Azul, 2009, 3-channel video installation with sound, TRT 25 min., made with the City of Los Angeles 2008-2009 COLA Individual Artist Fellowship; O Grito/The Shout, 2019, video installation with sound, TRT: 11:30 minute, made possible in part by a support from the Sacatar Foundation; Forest Whisper, 2022
, redwood, 77 x 25 x 23 inches, Gualala Arts Global Harmony Sculpture Garden, California, April 8, 2022 - present; More than One, 2024, video Installation with sound, TRT 11 minites, made with the support of Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation; Portrait of the artist.