Lucia Monge

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2018

Lucia Monge is a Peruvian artist who is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on how humans position themselves in the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants. She has organized Plantón Móvil for the past ten years, a yearly “walking forest” performance that leads to the creation of public green areas. 

During her residency at Oak Spring, Lucia explored the library collection and re-performed Charles Darwin's experiments on the movement of climbing plants. Lucia said she gained a great appreciation for the world of botanical illustration as a meeting place for artistic and scientific inquiry, and is grateful for everything Tony Willis and the staff at the library taught her.

Lucia returned to Oak Spring in  2019 in order to share what she learned from the Oak Spring Garden Library with our September 2019 Curated Artist in Residence. She continues to study climbing plants, and has created sculptures, textiles and a series of drawings based on her observations.

To learn more about Lucia, click here. To read our blogpost about one of Lucia’s recent projects, which involved sending 125 true potato seeds into space as part of an international art payload, click here.