Kaitlin Bryson

Kaitlin Bryson is an artist and ecologist whose disciplines include drawing, fiber arts, installation, landscape design, and sculpture. She comes from a biodynamic and permaculture farming background that inspires her “restorative, earth-based practices.” Her current work examines interactions between fungi and heavy metals. She is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Learn more about her at www.kaitlinbryson.com.

When Civilization Fails to Serve, It Must Collapse, 2020

Naturally-dyed fibers, embroidery, Pleurotus ostreatus mycelium, straw, light box

Decay is the beginning. 

It is the process of transformation. 

It is necessary for survival. 

Decay grows from the physical acknowledgement of the history of its parts through their un-making.

Fertility is the result of the activities of decay. 

Decay is the process of erosion. Erosion reveals sedimented histories - histories of settlement - of conquest and oppression of violence on bodies violence on land. Eroding rock breaks open language and belief systems set in stone. 

Decay and erosion are parables of entropy. 

The process of entropy quantifies. 

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This piece is in process now. Eventually it will be buried/installed in a public location in Los Angeles to offer nutrients to a damaged system.

Embroidered along with this text, are the names of all the black people who have been killed by the police since 2014. These names, these people are prayers. This work is an offering of nutrients and transformation to a failing society.

trauma | matura, 2017

Ganoderma lucidum (reishi mushroom) grown onto glass

Like plants, fungi are stimulated by stressors which cause adaptations and can break habits. This is true for humans too but is often easily forgotten. In this work, the reishi mushroom was put in adverse growing conditions without much oxygen, but through searching and shifting normal growth, it grew into this space and found what it needed.

I am amazed by the response to stress made by the biological community, but particularly that of the fungi. As creatures who have inhabited this planet for over 3 billion years, their adaptation strategies and digestive capacities are incredible, and truly unlike any other. I am interested in the lessons we can learn from these beings and also how we (humans) can work with them to help resolve the damage we have done to the planet that we share with all of life.   Trauma and Matura, are anagrams of one another and this reishi reflects both arrangements. I ask, how can we grow and adapt through our own stressors and traumas?  How can we make changes to thrive in the unfavorable conditions we find ourselves in today – ecologically, politically, socially, and psychologically?

Scores for restoration, 2020

Produced by the submergence collective

The "Scores for Restoration" is a score book//zine that prompts folx to collect data about place through reciprocal actions. We believe that as collecting is inherently an act of taking, we would like to offer something back to place in return for that knowledge/information. Furthermore, it is through continuous acts of return that restoration and nourishment truly take place. These scores ask their performers to collect data in a variety of poetic ways in hopes of prompting others to consider alternative and embodied methods of getting to know a place and understanding its ecology. 

We offer these scores as open territory for encounters, somewhere between theory and praxis, proposition and action, human and more-than-human. Each score slips into a cyclical path: reflexivity of self and place; (re)imaginative exploration of the known and unknown; performing reciprocity and healing remediation; preparing for the yet unfolding future; repeat. Within these gestures—to be carried out wherever one finds themselves—may there be dialogue, liberation, and beauty.

remedy | remediation clouds, 2018

Collaboration with artist, Ruth Le Gear

Watervapor, glass beakers, Usnea essence for: depression, apnea, inability to speak; and Birch polypore essence for: immunity, vitality, strength and  resistance; San Juan remedy: for deep physical pain that comes from polluted waters; Cedar remedy: hope embodied,  an essence of transformation

The Remedy Clouds were offerings made to the sky, precipitated from intentions of healing damaged lands, psyches, and bodies. This collaborative work between Ruth Le Gear and Kaitlin Bryson began in New Mexico and was released in Ireland where we joined on residency. 

Each micro-cloud offered a healing gesture through medicinal energy. The clouds were created in glass bottles with water vapor that contained lichen and mushroom essences, as well as homeopathic remedies. Bryson prepared the essences, and Le Gear made the remedies through her traditional processes. Inside the glass bottles, the clouds were created by making high-and-low pressure systems. Once the clouds accumulated inside, we released them into the atmosphere at sites of trauma.  

Both Le Gear and I explore methodologies for healing damaged places, and after considering many ways to combine our practices and geographic differences, we landed in the sky. It also helped that we were working in Ireland, in January, and so we were submerged in a cloud most of the time. However, we were interested in clouds because of their shapes, movements, and means of transportation. How they accumulate the world’s history and then drop it off at another location. How they move without borders or limitations.   We released our healing clouds hoping that the energy put forth would fall and offer nourishment to places suffering from extractive industries, deforestation, monocropping, environmental injustices, and pollution.