Category Archives: Visual Arts

51st Featured Thinker: Basia Irland

Cleo with ice book. NeoReo 2009. Image Courtesy of Claire Coté

Cleo with ice book. NeoReo 2009. Image Courtesy of Claire Coté

This week’s Featured Thinker is Basia Irland, Artist, Writer and Professor Emerita, University of New Mexico.  Writer Malin Wilson, has likened Basia to the 19th-century naturalists, an irrepressible researcher who is  ‘ transparently impassioned by water, watersheds, and the flora and fauna (including communities of people) that populate them’.

Basia describes her featured project  Ice Receding/Books Reseeding  as a means to ’emphasize the necessity of communal effort and scientific knowledge to deal with the complex issues of climate disruption and watershed restoration by releasing book-shaped, seed-laden, ephemeral ice sculptures into rivers’.  Read more….

48th Featured Thinker: Sarah Sexton

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This week’s Featured Thinker, Sarah Sexton, artist and teacher from Ireland, explores the concept of wilderness through her fascination with abandoned spaces.  She says, “I regularly ‘escape’ into little pockets of wilderness when I engage in my art practice.” Join Sarah on her search via beautiful photographs of small, wild, tucked away places and abandoned spaces where nature and “wildness” is reclaiming ownership. Read more….

43rd Featured Thinker: Phoebe Dick

Expandscape, 10m x 0.5m painting

Expandscape, 10m x 0.5m painting

This week our featured Wilderness Thinker is Phoebe Dick, an artist and poet from the North West of Ireland with a collection of ‘wilderness’ themed work inspired by the ‘wild west‘. Her creative practice rooted in observations from her  social or geographical surroundings are clarified into semi-fictional scenes or narratives,  to create generic, yet specific, situations, accessible to all. Whether as an etching of an imagined mountain range or a damning love song, an ability to create convincing fictions and a feeling you just might have been there. We hope you follow the links to enjoy Phoebe’s work… Read More

40th Featured Thinkers: Siena Sanderson and Annette Lisa

SienaAnnettefeatureThis week our featured Wilderness Thinkers are Siena Sanderson and Annette Lisa,  artists and art educators who passionately advocate for art and its potential to inspire hope through their work with the Neighbourhood Arts Project, Taos, New Mexico.

Where do you  go to connect with nature and the outdoors, where is your wilderness?

Siena and Annette present a wilderness ‘getaway’  and invite you to do the same,  sharing your personal wilderness ‘getaways’;  where’ and ‘why ‘ , here in the comments section and on the Thinking Wilderness Facebook page.

Gently guided by R.W. Service’s poem, The Call of the Wild a route-map is offered, provoking us to step away from our busy 21st Century lives for a moment and think wilderness. We hope you join them in building a digital wilderness tour. Read More…

37th Featured Thinker: Zoé Strecker

Digital image still from featured video work, Down, Up, Down: Pine Mountain Breathing (2014)

Digital image still from featured video work, Down, Up, Down: Pine Mountain Breathing (2014)

This week’s featured wilderness thinker is Zoé Strecker, artist, writer and art professorZoé’s ‘multi-modal thinking’ is consolidated through her durational exploration of  Pine Mountain, a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains that runs through Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Pine Mountain represents the last great contiguous stretch of unfragmented forest in Kentucky, breached only by six roads in 110 miles and  is also a significant unprotected wilderness area.

Zoé’s engagement develops a  mindful ecology around Pine Mountain extending her wilderness thinking into other communities through the students and volunteers with whom she works and collaborates, which includes SITE, an arts-led interdisciplinary educational collaboration with philosopher, Prof. Peter S. Fosl at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. This exploration of Pine Mountain generates creative and scholarly responses along with Zoé’s personal arts practice, which celebrates the exceptional biodiversity of Pine Mountain in southeastern Kentucky.  Read More….

30th Featured Thinker: Eleanor O’Hanlon

Sea ice in the Chukchi Sea, north of Bering Strait, March 18 2015. (Image:Marine Live-ice Automobile Expedition (MLAE).

Sea ice in the Chukchi Sea, north of Bering Strait, March 18 2015. (Image:Marine Live-ice Automobile Expedition (MLAE).

Writer and conservationist, Eleanor O’Hanlon, grew up in the rainy temperate climate of the West of Ireland and has has worked in conservation since the 1980’s, working for Greenpeace International, Environmental Investigation Agency and ITV’s Discovery channel. Winner of the 2014 Nautilus Gold Book Award for Nature Writing, with Eyes of the Wild, Eleanor re-visits her 2008 trip to Spitsbergen (Svalbard Archipelago)  updated with with images and information from the Marine Live-ice Automobile Expedition (MLAE), March 2015.

We hope you enjoy Eleanor’s timely and sensitive piece, her work, guided by biologists and other observers is illustrated with beautiful images, reconnecting us and renewing our longstanding relationship with the natural world.

Read more…….

29th Featured Thinker: Tara Baoth Mooney

Image: Destroyed Forest  and Moss Headpiece, Patrick Heneghan, 2011

Artist and designer, Tara Baoth Mooney investigates the idea of sustainability and its transcendence through many different forms, particularly the boundaries of human experience. Tara returns constantly to the theme of garments as a form of outer cladding and what that can mean to humanity on a daily basis. Through clothing, personal systems of identity are forged which have been constructed with deliberation and care. External cladding or garments, can act as an interface between individuals and their immediate environment, promoting reflection and encouraging communication.

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24th Featured Thinker: Anna Keleher

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Anna Keleher, from Devon, England, develops ideas, techniques, processes, skills and participatory artworks to expand 21st century perspectives. As our 24th Wilderness Thinker, Anna brings characteristic creativity, dedication to turning a topic on its head and to quote her directly, “shifting our thinking.” Her essay, “The Wilderness Inside” turns the concept of wilderness “inside out.” Read more…

21st Featured Thinker: Rachel Preston Prinz

RachelPRestonPrinzFeature3Rachel Preston Prinz established Archinia as a design co-op to develop project collaborations with architecture and design, ecology, natural building, archaeology, and landscape. Exploring boundaries between design and the natural world, planned and unplanned, managed and wild, are all approaches that Rachel has in her background that she is now integrating into her piece as a Featured Wilderness Thinker.

Rachel’s photographs represent a unique vision, one in which degenerating eyesight becomes an opportunity to look at the world differently and reconsider what we think we know; we felt this unique vision would bring something different to the Thinking Wilderness project. We were right. We could not have imagined the potential ripples Rachel’s invitation would set in motion. Her unique vision and commitment to collaboration have extended into her approach as a Wilderness Thinker in Residence. For her featured work, Rachel, has devised a project called “DesignGirl” to engage other designers to collaboratively “Think Wilderness” in a unique, year-long,  invitational project. We are excited to see where it leads! Read all about it….

20th Featured Thinkers: Third Graders, Arroyos del Norte

ArroyosFeatureKids and Wilderness go together in so many ways, which is why I’m so excited to present our Featured Thinkers this week: Gess Healey’s Third Grade Class from Arroyos del Norte Elementary School. We covered a lot of “ground” in our short time together….Read More.