Opening Reception: Saturday, March 29, 2025 from 12:00-2:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Address: 3815 American Blvd. East, Bloomington, MN 55428
Artistry and the Minnesota Wildlife Refuge are proud to present The Leaf Has a Song in It by Stephanie Hunder. Her work expresses a desire to place the natural world in a human context, specifically the Minnesota woodlands and prairies where she grew up. Her prints often begin with documented forms and textures drawn directly from the landscape. She combines these images with scientific diagrams as a way to study our contemporary relationship to the natural world. Merging these distinct types of information creates a visual connection between sense and comprehension; the complex, qualitative physical characteristics of the environment, and the simplified constructs we use to think about them.
Studies show that spending time in natural environments can benefit health and well-being, facilitated by visual stimuli, sound, touch, and other senses. Hunder captures this in her work using collagraph printmaking along with photographic processes like cyanotype, to evoke the sensory experience of nature’s wild space. In the press, the tactile surfaces of a leaf or branch are transformed, through pressure, into a visible image that evokes touch.
We also perceive the world through experience and shared ideas from science and culture. When we ask a question or create an experiment, observation often yields complex, tangled information rather than simple answers. Scientists and mathematicians transform these messy tangles into orderly theories with elegant diagrams suited to our human minds. Hunder’s work incorporates these mediated illustrations of knowledge and layers them with more complicated, documentary evidence of the world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Stephanie Hunder is a Minnesota artist and arts educator who creates with ink, paper, and light.Her current work studies human relationships to the natural world through botanical and scientific iconography, combining photographic and digital techniques with traditional printmaking processes. Creating content through process and the importance of hands-on research is a focus in her teaching. Stephanie received her BFA and MA from the UW–Madison,and MFA from Arizona State. She currently teaches atMinneapolis College of Art & Design and the University of Minnesota. Hunder was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Printmaking for 2025.
