Meet our Fellows: Emma Steinkraus' Impossible Garden
Emily Ellis
Some of history’s most stunning and innovative scientific art has been created by women, yet much of it has never been seen by the general public. Too often, women artist-scientists have been overshadowed by their male counterparts, resulting in their work and stories either being lost to history or tucked away in rare book libraries or archives.
Emma at work in her studio at Oak Spring, which was formerly a firehouse on the airstrip.
Emma Steinkraus, an artist, professor of fine arts, and one of our two 2020 Eliza Moore Fellows, is working to bring the contributions of such women to the light. Through a combination of photoshop and painting, Emma is assembling thousands of images of the animals, insects, and plants created by 130 of history’s female scientific artists working between the 15th and 19th centuries into a mural wallpaper.
Emma’s project brings together their work in an “Impossible Garden,” where life-size images of fruits, flowers, and animals painted by women from different countries and time periods are gathered in and around delicate trees. The colorful work, which will have a digital component down the road, is a “public history project,” said Emma, who began working on it three years ago.
“The goal is to have the project really live as an art piece, but also as an educational piece, or educational platform,” she explained. “The long term dream would be that you can scroll through the wallpaper and hover over different images, and see a profile of that artist. I'm slowly working on the research aspect so that I can write short profiles for each artist. A few of them are heavily researched, like Maria Sibylla Merian and Giovanna Garzoni, but the vast majority, you can find the same five sentences about them on the internet and very little else.”
Besides conventional internet searches, Emma has been visiting archives and libraries to learn about the artists. An Arkansas native who currently lives in Farmville, VA and teaches at a liberal arts college, she is interested in creating work where “art and science, the human and the non-human, collaborate and collide.” One of the reasons the Eliza Moore Fellowship was such a good fit for her project was the opportunity to visit the vast collection of botanical and scientific art by women housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library, she said.
Miss Gough. “A lime plant. Creeper from our garden, taken from nature. Common Indian weeds. Singapore Butterfly. Grasshopper.” An album of Indian plants, fruit, birds, and insects. Madras, 1840-43
“I got to see a lot of work in person for the first time that I had already been researching, ” she continued. “The biggest discovery for me was this manuscript by a young woman named Miss Gough, who we don't know a ton about, but it's a really large book of hand painted botanical and ornithological pieces, just truly spectacular quality paintings.”
While information on history’s women naturalists can be hard to come by in general, the stories of women who were not white and wealthy are particularly difficult to find, Emma said. Highlighting their contributions is one of her goals for the project.
“The inequalities that are baked into our history have been very apparent to me as I've worked on this project,” she said. “There's so much more information about the wealthy, white women who make scientific illustrations, and much less information that's readily available about women who came from working class backgrounds, or who were working outside Europe and North America, or who were women of color.”
Among those women are Sarah Mapps Douglas, a Black abolitionist, botanical illustrator, and educator who worked in Philadelphia in the 1840s, and Shin Saimdang, a Korean botanical artist, writer, and calligrapher who worked in the 1500s.
“A lot of the women I'm researching were renaissance women, they had a lot of really diverse interests and talents, and really interesting stories that deserve to be widely known,” said Emma.
By presenting her project as wallpaper - which not only nods to feminist artwork that reworks decorative “feminine” mediums such as needlepoint, but allows for the inclusion of complimentary art, such as photographs and paintings - Emma hopes to help other people “find these stories more easily.”
“I have really loved getting to know these women and their work, so I wanted to create a space where other people can access it without having that particular rabbit hole take over two years of their lives,” she said. “It is important to me to show that the role of women in art history has not been one or two exceptional women who made paintings or drawings or sculptures, but rather hundreds of women whose work is still known to us.”
“I’m interested in how you can treat a toad as a princess in a Rococo painting,” said Emma.
While working on “Impossible Garden” was the main focus of her stay at Oak Spring, Emma also used her time at the foundation to work on a series of paintings inspired by the plants and animals in her own garden (“I’m interested in how you can treat a toad as a princess in a Rococo painting,” said Emma, who counts pop culture icon Lisa Frank among her many artistic influences). Residencies are a time of “exploration and adventure,” she said, and she looks forward to seeing how her time at Oak Spring influences “Impossible Garden” down the line.
“I first dreamed up this project at a residency in Ireland,” she said. “So it’ll be interesting to see how the gardens and the landscape and the fabric and wallpaper samples I’ve seen here trickle into the work.”
To learn more about Emma and follow her projects, visit her website or follow her on Instagram at @emmasteinkraus.
Banner image, “Installation Shot of ‘Impossible Garden’” by Emma Steinkraus. Video: “Wallpaper scroll of ‘Impossible Garden’” by Emma Steinkraus.