[melancholy music]
[package rustling]
[pestle smashing]
[stone grinding]
What does it mean to think about climate change
from the perspective of art?
The New Earth series,
they give people a way to think about these issues
that's sort of an inviting welcome
rather than like being barraged with more facts.
Every shape in the series is an image
of real glacier loss in different parts of the world.
That's the shape of loss.
So I have these two NASA images.
This is Columbia Glacier,
up in the Canadian Rockies in 1986
and this is the glacier in 2014.
It's like a scab was ripped off
or like skin was ripped off,
and that is the wound.
[melancholy piano music]
I was preparing to teach a class on climate change.
I was digging into kind of the worst of the information
and feeling a lot of what I couldn't quite identify
at the time as climate grief,
but that's what I was experiencing.
A sense of hopelessness, helplessness.
[water sloshing]
I sort of paint with the water first
and then I drop those pigment mixtures into the water,
and you'll see it's kind of dramatic.
What we really need rather than obsessing
about consumer behavior and choosing the thing
with the green label rather than the thing
with the non-green washed label
is to think about out how to create massive systemic change.
[canvas scratching]
It gives more gesture to the shapes
so the heavier pigments are gonna settle into those cuts.
After I graduated with a degree in scientific illustration,
I got an internship at "Scientific American."
I was there as a freelancer for about two years.
Those two years were really exciting.
I learned so much.
I also learned that I'm not really an illustrator.
My earlier work was hyper realistic.
I started to get kind of burned out,
frankly, on representational painting,
and it started to get a little bit rote feeling.
I also realized at that point that the art
that first spoke to me like as a young teenager
was abstract art.
I grew up going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I think I was 15 and I was in the MoMA
by myself wandering around.
This Mark Rothko painting hit me like,
you know, like a cyclone or like a tidal wave.
I sat in front of it for hours that day.
What Rothko was trying to do
was convey a spiritual experience of the void.
And I think at that point in my
of life in my early thirties,
I was like, what I actually need to be doing is closer
to what the abstract expressionists were doing.
So the paintings in the web series were the first ones
where I started to rely primarily on pigments
that I had foraged and found.
Pretty much everything in the world
could potentially make paint.
So this is an invasive plant called pokeweed.
That's gonna make a lot of ink.
So the foraging process,
I think of it as primarily an act of listening.
It's a way to like go out into the world
and to try to really pay attention
to the place and what it offers.
[upbeat guitar music]
Seems like it would be like this color gray when I crush it,
and it may or may not be a completely different color.
Nature is extremely important in my artwork.
It is really the root source of why I do what I do.
It's really special to like go out
to these incredible places and find these pigments.
But there's also something really rewarding about just being
in a random neighborhood in the middle
of the grid and foraging from there.
[cheerful guitar music]
Not a bad haul at all.
So this is like my little treasure chest here.
Carbonized Devil's Club,
a native plant that was used by the indigenous people
to create tattoos.
You don't wanna shake its hand.
These are elk bones.
They make a really beautiful, like rich, rich, rich black.
Bone black is one of the oldest blacks
when we look at cave paintings from prehistoric times.
So the terra cotta,
this could be turned into oil paint, watercolor, tempera.
I'm gonna make watercolor.
[pestle smashing]
It's good for if you're feeling frustrated.
[pestle tapping]
[terra cotta grinding]
It's actually a bit of a workout.
I like to, you know, have something that's kind of chunky.
I do a lot of residencies in different parts of the world
and I'll collect both pigment and water from wherever I am.
I could collect some hot springs water,
I could collect river water.
I think they have sort of different intelligences.
Part of the magic of making one's own paint
is the subtleties that can arise in like a stone
from here and water from here.
It's like a really delicious sort of magenta.
The definition of an ecological system is cooperation
and interrelationship.
So I think of making paint in that way as a kind
of ecology that I'm toying with.
[water spraying]
This is rainwater.
And like, I was kind of a serious child.
I think I've become much more playful as I've gotten older.
I never really thought I would think
of meringue as a painting medium.
I spent a lot of time just hanging out on this cliff,
watching the waves,
and you know how the waves kick up
and the foam blows along the sand.
And I just started thinking like, how could I do that?
[relaxing guitar music]
It's pretty important to me that the process be fun,
but fun in a way that's often like about experimentation
and about removing my own capacity for control.
Oh yeah, that's a neat one.
[relaxing guitar music]
Cool.