Preview
Creation Date
2023
Description
Materials: Acrylic and yarn on canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 28 inches
Project Advisor: Tony Conrad, Brittany Sievers and Benjamin D. Reinhart
Year of Graduation: 2023
Medium
Painting
Medium
Installation
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
Imagine stepping onto a soft rippling cloud of moss that holds your weight like memory foam. The air smells sweet as citrus and hums with dragonfly wings and leopard frog croaks. Below your feet, ten thousand years of sphagnum moss reach down into the depth of an ancient glacial lake. Water rushes up and out across the mossy expanse through capillary action. Carnivorous plants and tamarack trees grow and adapt to this strange and miraculous environment, only to be swallowed up by sphagnum in time. Nothing here decays. This cold, anoxic environment has so few decomposers, that all who die here are preserved in an eternal death, cradled in moss, mummified by acidic bog water. Standing in a bog is like walking across an intricate fabric of life, death, everything connected and still growing.
I invite you to explore this installation as an ecologist would: feel the textures of moss, observe interactions between organisms, make connections and discoveries. Each painting tells a different story about bogs. Cradled in Moss is a tribute to the ancient mummified “bog people'' in Europe and North America, who held sacred spiritual connections to bogs. Also in this installation, you will find bog music, an artistic collaboration with student composer Mathew Dechant, inspired by the interdependent wildlife in bogs. You and I are linked to this ecosystem too; bogs are impressive carbon sinks sequestering 25% of the world’s carbon, despite covering just 3% of the world's surface. Our futures in the face of climate change depend on how we interact with environments like this one.