3D visual representations of ecological or evolutionary systems have the potential to present an intimate and tangible sense of how these systems might work. I say “might,” because the visual representations are of course only models of how things work (see: “all models are wrong, some are useful” –George Box).

Every choice of colour or material or spatial structure is a choice to represent ecology or evolution in a certain way. In any art piece, some of these choices are deliberate. I make these deliberate choices while trying to weigh the value of accuracy, aesthetics, and viewer comprehension. Other choices I make without full awareness or analysis. As the artist, discovering these unexamined choices after the fact can teach me, as well as the viewer, about my perspectives on ecology and evolution.

The piece shown here is both a representation of macroevolution and of personal familial connections. Using the methods involved in making friendship bracelets (forward knots and backward knots across multiple embroidery threads), I constructed a branching “tree” that represents a small part of the evolutionary story of how living things are related to each other. The way the coloured threads sort and branch represents the way lineages change and weave and separate over evolutionary time.

This small tree is a tiny section of the greater family tree of all life.  The branches are arranged based on our current understanding of how Bembidion across the world are related to each other. Bembidion are small, shiny, black beetles that live mostly on gravel river shores, eating tiny flies and other insects that float in on the current.

Bembidion is also the group that my father studies, and he raised me on stories of their evolution and relationships.  This means that while this tree and the associated concepts have strong roots in science, they also carry a personal weight for me. Once upon a time, there was a tiny, simple critter who had kids. One of those kids would go on to have Bembidion beetles as descendants, while their sibling would go on to have my dad and me as descendants.  

Finally, the tree originates from and is framed by a wicker basket. This particular basket is from a thrift store in Victoria, BC, but the design of the basket is almost identical to a basket my mum had in my original childhood home. That basket was notable for the fact that she made an unusual lampshade out of it. That lamp was a central feature in the living room in which I remember spending many a cool desert morning sitting with my mum while she drank her morning coffee.

I am drawn to the intimacy and immediacy of painting.  This medium allows for a rich exploration of both control and surrender, particularly when engaging with its fluidity.  I work intuitively and focus on maintaining a balance between my intentions and the element of chance.  I find this both motivating and challenging, and beyond the art practice, a powerful metaphor for navigating our world.

My work is strongly driven by process within the framework of investigating what shapes us, and seeking the connections between the physical, psychological, personal, and environmental.  I create spaces that slowly reveal their subjects, referencing both internal and external worlds.  I begin with an abstract environment of textures and colours, and I draw parallels between the earthy and the visceral.  At first glance, the paintings might appear quite abstract, but with time, the forms, -a face or human figure-, become more recognizable.  In these paintings, my intention is to entice the viewer to take time, to become aware of what is subtle, and to consider the relevance of what is seen or sensed and what is left hidden or overlooked.

Two Sides of the Story

With Two Sides of the Story, the neuron performs both as a reference to our inner landscape as well as a representation of the movement of energy and paths traced by forces both inside of us and in our environment.

This diptych was also the first of a series of paintings where I explore mirror images, playing with symmetry and asymmetry.  I have always been interested in the role of visual symmetry in our lives.  However, when I learned about mirror neurons, I became curious of symmetry on a functional level, and further, in the places where that symmetry deviates.

Two Sides of the Story is also an exploration of multiples.  When creating multiple variations of a piece, I am thinking of each as an evolution, where each evolution is its own possibility.  I am interested in potential, diversions and deviations, healing and neuroplasticity.

Building upon how my process examines the relationship between intention and chance, I continue to investigate the extent to which our choices have a role in our lives.

https://dzeelouise.com/

When people ask what I do, I tell them I make flowers.  I call them Frankenflora.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “What If You Slept,” a “strange and beautiful flower” is plucked from a dream in heaven and brought back to our waken world.  Years after I first read this poem, after I volunteered at an herbarium, after I became fascinated with the mutability of orchids, after I lost my father, did I begin to understand just how strange and beautiful that flower was.  In my grief, I was plunged into a frenzy of piecing together parts of dead flora to create—or replicate—Coleridge’s poetic flower.

I consult the study of botany, practice ikebana, and experiment with the concept of hybridization, using sections of pressed or dried plants to construct a flower, like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.  That hybrid speciation is more commonly found in plants than animals makes them the ideal media for this practice, so Frankenflora (with its variations given binomial names) may represent a species that is perhaps not altogether impossible.

We are born into this world the product of two genetic codes, but along the way we pick up bits of the people we love and bits of the things we marvel at, and in the end we leave as a whole greater than the sum of these parts.  It is my hope that Frankenflora might be a balm for those who have also lost loved ones, that they might be a part of the departed to occupy the void left behind.

The Frankenflora won’t die again but they’re still fragile.  In events of loss, we have to be gentle in remembering whole lives, and be careful not to forget them.

www.furiebeckite.com/

Christina Steele is a Vancouver based glass artist focused on glassblowing and glass etching.  Christina took her first hot glass class in 2003 at Red Deer College's summer art series and was instantly hooked on the medium.  She is currently an enthusiastic member of Vancouver's Terminal City Glass Co-op in East Vancouver.

Inspired by botanical drawings, the artist etches images onto blown glass pieces by drawing them first on a masking material which are then cut by hand and sandblasted.  The resulting frosted etchings on transparent glass give a dynamic effect depending on where the viewer stands in relation to the light.

This piece is the first in a series where I will be exploring images of grains and grasses.  Images of wheat conjures thoughts of Thanksgiving, harvest, abundance, renewal.  For me these images also remind me of the playfulness of childhood; pulling out stalks of grain by the roadside as you walk by, meticulously removing each grain one by one or all at once from the bottom to make a little starburst, lost in thought.  Looking back, these simple actions strike me as a type of simple meditation or mindfulness.  As an adult I have often found it difficult to find the peace to calm my anxious thoughts long enough to meditate or practice mindfulness.  I have found that the focus involved in glassblowing and process and time involved in crafting a complicated hand cut stencil for sandblasting is very therapeutic and very satisfying.  This piece revisits a simple childhood mindfulness by employing learned coping methods of adulthood.

www.instagram.com/xtinasteeleglass/

I have been working with glass for the past four years.  My first taste of glassblowing began at Terminal City Glass where I took a weekend workshop.  I have been fascinated with glass from an early age.  The transparency of glass drew me in. I love the combination of art, creativity, strength, and science that glassblowing encompasses. 

I have been exploring the medium of glass in terms of form and colour this past year.  My latest collection is inspired by my environment, living in a quiet neighbourhood surrounded by trees and pathways.  As I walk through nature trails nearby with my curious dog, I am drawn to look up at the sky and admire its beauty.  Walking in the trails close to home, I feel a sense of calmness and peacefulness come over me.  Whether the sky be blue, grey, cloudy or dark I am reminded of the vastness of the universe and appreciate being in the moment. 

Being outside in my surroundings gives me calmness and a clear mind, and the same is true for when I'm in the glassblowing studio.  Being able to blow glass helps me stay in the present moment, focused on exactly what I am doing. 

Glassblowing is a part of my daily life and I practice at least once or twice per week.  When I start a piece I have decided on the colours and general form that I want to make.  I work intuitively and follow my whims.  The most satisfying part of glassblowing is seeing my improvement over time and when a piece comes together smoothly while I'm in the flow of working.  Working with hot molten glass is complex, challenging, versatile, dangerous, exciting and rewarding all at the same time.  This is what keeps me coming back to glass again and again. 

The work I make in glass endeavours to tap into our more uncomfortable emotions - pain, anxiety, grief, desperation, fear.  This is meant not to alienate but to resonate; these emotions, that we often work so hard to hide, are at the centre of what makes us human beings, and my goal for anything I make is to create a bridge between the person and the object.  A safe space, for a moment, to go where we don’t normally want to send ourselves.  Or to let the piece go there for you.

My background has a lot of parts that have come together over the course of my life as a maker of things.  I started in still photography, then went on to make films, then multimedia theatre, and then glass, all while working as a graphic designer as a means of supporting myself.  The combination led me to use all of my tools from all of the things I’ve done: I put images that tell theatrical stories onto glass - always either photographs I’ve taken or graphics I’ve created myself.

www.hopeforstenzer.com

This drawing/intaglio print is a self-portrait. I often like to combine objects seeming from nature in my drawings with parts of the body in a sort of imagined space. This somewhat illustrates what it feels like to dream, and helps to put me in touch with that process of mind. I don't normally plan much initially when I begin a drawing, as I like to think of each added element as a sort of piece of a dialogue I'm having with myself, a call and response that works itself out / helps me to work through different emotions. This self portrait reminds me of a time where I went on a meditation retreat, where we were instructed to meditate 11 hours a day for 11 days, maintain no eye contact with anyone and to remain silent. I went sort of crazy on the 7th day and thought I could feel the size and shape of each of my major organs. Even though it was only 11 days without any social exchange, the experience was interesting but also kind of terrible and caused me to feel sad for people in solitary confinement. It gave me slightly more of an understanding of the struggle for sanity within those conditions.

http://www.megankeetley.com/

Pen and ink has long been my medium of choice, because it’s just about unforgiving.  There’s no undo button- when a stroke goes rogue, you’re forced to work with it.  The ability to create something beautiful from that rogue stroke has always been deeply satisfying to me.  My process does always begin in pencil, but just as an outline.  The real work is done with pen, in varying lines widths.

Drawing is the most meditative exercise I experience.  As you can see in my work, there is a great deal of time spent repeating a small detail again and again.  This is where I create my space for reflection, and is why creating artwork is so important to me.

When designing a piece, I love to include small nostalgic subjects.  They can symbolize a place that I’ve had on my mind, or a community I’m pining for.  My more recent works have been quite Canadian themed, dreamt up when I was longing to be surrounded by familiar sights and my own traditions.

That same sense of nostalgia is what I most want to instil in my audience.  My work will often include whimsical figures to be found, which are intended to pique that same emotion.  The images inside a piece aren’t always clear from the beginning, and I enjoy witnessing the sense of achievement my audience can have by finding something new.

"In the late evenings, and during the night I did innumerable drawings in gouache and pencil – all of them abstract, and all them my own way of exploring the particular tensions and relationships of form and colour which were to occupy me in sculpture during the later years of the war."

Barbara Hepworth

"There is an inside and an outside to every form. When they are in special accord, as for instance a nut in its shell or a child in the womb, or in the structure of shells or crystals, or when one senses the architecture of bones in the human figure, then I am most drawn to the effect of light. Every shadow cast by the sun from an ever-varying angle reveals the harmony of the inside to outside. Light gives full play to our tactile perceptions through the experience of our eyes, and the vitality of forms is revealed by the interplay between space and volume."
"At this time [1928–9] all the carvings were an effort to find a personal accord with the stones or wood which I was carving. I was fascinated by the new problem which arose out of each sculpture, and by the kind of form that grew out of achieving a personal harmony with the material."

Barbara Hepworth


As a sculptor I have often used Barbara Hepworth as a point of inspiration, just as she used Brancusi.
I have attempted to convey her influence in my own work with a series of small soap stones that I have carved while on camping trips or moments where I am struck by the surrounding environment.
The drawing I am showing is part of that journey. I have used the same materials (gouache, pencil, paper) as Barbara Hepworth to convey these forms.
This drawing is a sculpture reproduced on paper.

Heart break is like an atomic bomb, the total destruction of a vision of your life.  When staring at the void of an unknown future here are extreme and universal reactions. 

My artistic practise has splintered in two; my commercial work and ink drawings that fill my sketchbooks.  With "The End Is Here," I focused on making drawings that I normally reserve only for my own therapeutic expression.  I aimed to build a narrative around how I process feelings of loss and how I have come to terms with uncertainty. 

http://hollytruax.ca/