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Filtering by Tag: alumni
Artist and educator Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in the U.S. after his family migrated. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. Learn more about him at http://fidenciofperez.com, and read an interview with him on our blog.
Eve Allen is a Master in City Planning Candidate, Environmental Policy and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on developing strategies to weave plant genetic diversity into the fabric of cities and suburbs. You can learn more about her on our blog.
Aleca Borsuk is a Ph.D candidate in Plant Ecophysiology at Yale University whose research interests are plant morphology, plant physiology, and bio-inspired technology. Her work aims to improve carbon assimilation models based on a new, spatially resolved understanding of leaf internal anatomy. Learn more about her on our blog.
Artist and scholar Brittany Carson holds a master’s degree in Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology from North Carolina State University. She has worked as a horticulturist and researcher in Madagascar, Botswana, and throughout the U.S. Her research explores a botanical sense of place from an Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) perspective. Learn more about her on our blog.
Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her dissertation project investigates the artistic and knowledge production of painted and printed flower books from Germany and the Low Countries in the long seventeenth century (c. 1575–1725). Her research intersects topics in the history of art, science, and the book, and experiments with methods in material culture and digital humanities. Applying the concept of “making and knowing” and “learning by doing,” Jessie particularly engages with historical reworking/remaking as an empirical way to inquire into producing (color) images of the plant world. Jessie’s research at Oak Spring will support her PHD dissertation on seventeenth-century flower books “Everlasting Flowers Between the Pages,” a project which investigates the artistic and knowledge production of early modern botanical watercolors and their contribution to the development of plant science. You can learn more about her at https://jessieweihsuanchen.com.
To read about Jessie’s research, visit our blog.
Josepha Richard is a historian specialised in 18-19th century China, with a specific interest in the urban history of Guangzhou (Canton) and Sino-Western interactions under the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese history at the department of Historical Studies in Bristol University, England. Recently she became an Oak Spring Garden Foundation fellow at the University of Bristol as part of the John Bradby Blake project. The latter combines history of art and science by analysing botanically accurate paintings of Chinese plants commissioned by British trader John Bradby Blake in late 18th century Guangzhou, and Blake's abundant handwritten manuscripts on the plants.
As part of her Stacy Lloyd III grant, Josepha will be comparing Blake painting commissions and manuscripts held in OSGF with other archives containing parts of Blake's collections in the UK.
“The OSGF library is a dream come true for a researcher,” wrote Josepha of her research at Oak Spring. “I have never found quite such a unique blend of beauty and practicality, comfort and access to rare books and artworks. In particular, I have found the availability of different manuscripts of Western botanical artworks to compare with Blake’s hybrid Sino-British botanical paintings invaluable.”
To learn more about Josepha and her research, follow her on Twitter or visit our blog.
Emma Steinkraus is an artist, curator, assistant professor, and the visual arts editor of the contemporary poetry and art magazine Company Journal, currently based in Farmville, VA. Her work combines paintings, photo transfers, and installations to explore gender and ecology. Her project for the Eliza Moore fellowship, Impossible Garden, documents the contributions of women to natural history and scientific illustration by 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.
To learn more about Emma, visit www.emmasteinkraus.com/.
To see more of her work and read about her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, visit our Shelter in Art Exhibit and our blog.
Maddison Colvin is an interdisciplinary visual artist residing in Utah who currently works in Brigham Young University’s Department of Art. Her work focuses on themes of ecology, built environment, and communal knowledge, and spans media from painting to video game design. Her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, titled Eden(s), explores humankind’s visual, aesthetic, and cultural responses to gardens by weaving together essays, photos, drawings, paintings, and facsimiles of other botanical work into a book. Learn more about Maddison at http://maddisoncolvin.com/.
To see more of Maddison’s work and read about her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, visit our blog.
Kristan Hanson is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, where her research focuses on women and horticulture in late nineteenth-century French visual culture.
“My dissertation topic aligns perfectly with Rachel Lambert Mellon’s collection of rare and unique materials pertaining to plants, gardens, and landscapes as well as her interest in French Impressionist paintings,” Kristan said.
During her residency, Kristan consulted rare books, botanical illustrations, and other resources related to her dissertation "In Bloom: Women and Horticulture in French Visual Culture, 1860s-1880s." The interdisciplinary project examined how painters responded to the key roles of Parisian women and plant mobility in local and global horticultural networks. Kristan used the library’s collections to research the emergence of domestic gardening and floral arranging as gendered leisure pursuits, the contributions of understudied women artists to the field of botanical illustration, as well as the formation of transregional horticultural trade routes and their impact on social practices and artistic representations in nineteenth-century France. A focus of her research were the botanical illustrations of pelargoniums by artists Lise Cloquet and Baroness van Lyden, whose work helped to establish a fashion for those flowers in 1820s Europe.
You can read more about Kristan here.
Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts Practice, focusing on Public Fieldwork, urban ecology, and socially engaged art, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Ellie’s work sits at the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology. As an Eliza Moore Fellow, she extended work on her Feral and Invasive Pigments project, which involved making watercolor paint from the leaves, petals, and berries of spontaneous plants growing in urban areas or places otherwise impacted by human activity. To learn more about Ellie, click here.
Jennifer Scheuer is an artist and collaborative printer whose work focuses on lithography and the history of print. She currently holds a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Her artistic research is based on plants, medicine, the body and healing throughout history.
“I have been working with archives and historical books in my artistic research and greatly value the time to spend with historical and contemporary primary documents,” Jennifer said. “Dedicated time at [Oak Spring] was an opportunity to create new series of work...and for internal growth in understanding of the relationship between humans and plants.”
Jennifer spent much of her two week residency in the Oak Spring Garden Library, researching both herbals and the Doctrine of Signatures (a concept from the early 16th century which states that plants resembling certain body parts can be used to treat ailments in those body parts). Jennifer’s residency provided her with the time to develop new imagery and an artist book exploring scholarship, gardening, art, and the earth.
To learn more about Jennifer, click here.
Lindsay Wells holds an M.A. in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her research focuses on environmental humanities and visual culture, and she used the Stacy Lloyd fellowship to research her doctoral dissertation, which explores how nineteenth-century houseplant horticulture influenced the botanical imagery of the British Aesthetic Movement.
“My research as a Stacy Lloyd III Fellow will not only challenge our current understanding of botanical motifs in Victorian visual culture, but also foster critical exchanges between art history and the environmental humanities,” Lindsay said. “The Oak Spring Garden Library Collection contains hundreds of items of direct relevance to my project.”
During her residency, Lindsay researched rare books, historical documents, and works of art from the Oak Spring Garden library collection about the history of indoor gardening. You can learn more about her here.
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.
Ashley Boulden, the inaugural recipient of the 2018 Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study, is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Art. Her dissertation focuses on engraved ornament prints that circulated in Paris during the eighteenth century, including the embroidery patterns of Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin. Her particular focus is the 258-page manuscript “Recueil de plantes” by Saint-Aubin housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library, which had not previously been digitized or widely researched.
Learn more about Ashley and her work here.