Prologues
OSGF
Q&A With Alex Boersma
Where have you been the past few months?
For the past few months, I’ve been holed up with my husband in our 1 bedroom apartment in Chicago. Luckily, we live within walking distance of one of the few beaches still left open in the city, and it’s become our sanity-preserving ritual to walk over there a few times a week.
Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?
As a scientific illustrator, I work directly with scientists at museums, universities and research institutions, creating visuals to communicate their ideas to a broader audience. Meanwhile, teaching at local art centers and nature museums has given me a direct insight into how other people in my community understand their environment.
My personal art practice is influenced by those collaborations, as I re-examine the relationship between scientific institutions and the natural world. How the objects and organisms housed in natural history museums, public gardens, conservatories and private collections form our understanding of the nature?
Specifically, my recent body of work (prior to COVID-19) questions what natural history specimens can show us about our everyday surroundings, and what is obscured or altogether lost. Natural history collections reveal the wild and ghostly past lives of urban environments: organisms now absent from the landscape live on as objects of research, tangible traces of certain times and places. But so little remains—walking through the museum, we struggle to use these fragmented traces to connect past and present worlds.
Each piece starts with a specific specimen housed in one of Chicago’s scientific institutions, be it a herbarium specimen, taxidermized critter or a fossil. I reconstruct the story of each object through its accompanying data, research into the species, and detailed observations of its material condition. The resulting artwork imagines a meeting point between the city’s present landscape and its past ecologies across both historic and deep time.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
Quarantine has been a surprisingly busy time for my scientific illustration work! I’ve been tackling multiple projects, including collaborations with a lab focused on light microscopy, illustrations for ecologists at UC Riverside, and an animation for a water conservation non- profit in Utah. I’ve also been working on my first children’s book! All that hasn’t left too much time for embarking on ambitious creative projects of my own, but it’s been nice in this moment of so much uncertainty to focus on smaller artistic undertakings that allow for some experimentation.
How has your artistic practice changed during this time?
During this time, it’s been limiting to not be able to visit the institutions, such as museums and botanic gardens, that are central to my artistic practice. Without such collections to draw on, I’ve been rethinking my ideas of what constitutes a collection, a source of knowledge and discovery. I’ve taken more time to consider my own collections more—my collection of houseplants, the baby plants in my garden, the trees in my neighborhood—and I’ve been very grateful to get to know my surroundings a bit better. It feels like there are infinite things to learn about plants and nature just within walking distance of our apartment, and it’s endlessly fascinating to try and document some of that knowledge in my artwork.
Has COVID-19 shifted how you think about the natural world?
Back in January, I finally signed up for my first community garden plot. I started combing through seed catalogues, appealing to green-thumbed friends for advice, and planning out my 4’x8’ plot. In my gardening fervor, I decided to start some of my seeds indoors, regardless of the lack of space in our one-bedroom apartment.
I received my seeds in the mail just as the shelter-in-place order came into effect, and promptly sowed three egg cartons full of tomato, pepper, leek, ground cherry, and basil seeds. I anxiously waited for them to sprout, worrying that my apartment was too cold or that I would over-water them. The seeds prevailed and, sooner than expected, little green sprouts were crowding up our one south-facing window.
Throughout isolation, my mood has become intertwined with the fate of my seedlings. I’ve heralded each new leaf, berated myself for allowing them to wilt, mourned over losses to damping off, and cheered for their perseverance despite less than ideal conditions. I’ve spent more time than I thought possible just staring, admiring their tiny tricomes, the delicate gradient up their stems, the charismatic shape of tomato leaves.
The community garden opened a few weeks ago, but I have yet to work up the courage to transplant my seedlings. Regardless of how my seedlings fare in my plot, they’ve altered my perception. Until now, my main attitude towards nature has been that of a scientific illustrator: observer, appreciator, and documenter. But cohabitating with my seedlings has attuned me to nature in new ways. It has made me a keener observer, a more informed appreciator, and a more patient documenter. Most of all, it has changed my perception of time passing—a few long months for me, but an entire childhood for a seedling, and a mere second for a tree.