Artist Statements:
Margi Grill
As a painter primarily working in landscape, my work has focused on the environments we experience every day. I am drawn to the overlap of human-made spaces and areas allowed to be wild. My art tends to focus on the land that is familiar to me, while representative of larger ecological issues. I start by diluting water-soluble oils to create a translucent wash and let it spill over the surface. A work is composed of several layers, wavering between precise realism and gestural abstraction. The painting process is an opportunity to capture the feverishness with which a landscape can survive and the blank spaces that show the path ahead.
This series of paintings illustrates twelve specific invasive plant species, usingwater-soluble oils on custom-made wood boards. My process for the series begins byresearching why and how a specific plant was brought to the area, how it survives in theenvironment, and its effect on the ecosystem. I draw the plant directly onto the board,and as the illustration progresses I add layers of pattern that relate to the origin of thespecies. Copper leaf is added to each of the paintings to draw focus to the intricatedetails of leaf patterns, vines tendrils, or blossoms. My intention for the project is not tovilify invasive species, but rather show the complex beauty of each plant and to thenprovoke an interest in how our introduction of the plant has altered the ecosystem.
Cindy Koopman
I love the structure and organization of plants and am fascinated by how they fit into our structure and organization. Currently, I am working with imagery derived from weekly visits to the Bell Museum’s herbarium collection. I use these drawing sessions to better understand the structure and organization of the plants. These specimens have been dried and arranged to benefit their study and not for how they lived in nature. I like that juxtaposition of the real plant and its unnatural arrangement.
From these sessions, I make prints and other works which place the specimens into settings that reference the plant and its structure without trying to replicate the initial drawing or specimen precisely. Many of the images contain maps, text, or coordinates which indicate the harvest location of the original herbarium artifact. I use a laser engraver to cut the plant forms out of a thin plastic substrate that can be carved and inked as an intaglio or relief. The laser is also used to create relief stencils or to burn an image directly onto the print. I am interested in playing and experimenting with color, shape, and idea.
