Exhibition | Ecological Niche

This blog won’t deal much with “news” but I’m making an exception for my first exhibition at Hang Art Gallery in San Francisco’s Union Square, running until May 15. I’m fortunate to share the spotlight with Veronica Diament, whose works are also botanically-inspired. Here’s the announcement plus a few shots from the Artist Reception on May 4—if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s still time to see the show!

In my next post I’ll return to my artist residency experience at Mountain Seas Retreat in Tasmania. Stay tuned!

Darren

Me with Floreana, inspired by the so-named island in the Galápagos.

Center and right, Ecuador-inspired Lagoon and Ghost Isle.

At right, New Zealand-inspired Great Walk, soon to be with its lucky new owner!

Sanctuary | Residency on Flinders Island, Tasmania

Sanctuary, watercolor on layered paper, 15”x15.”

The worldview that initiated my current series of work—watercolors in the “fractured” style integrating aerial and perspective views—is Sanctuary. Unlike the others it’s made of multiple pieces of paper, layered and glued onto a wood panel, and as the “archetype” I’m keeping it in my own collection for now. I created it (minus the gluing and mounting) at the end of a truly idyllic artist residency at Mountain Seas Art and Wilderness Retreat, on Flinders Island off the northeast coast of Tasmania, Australia, for the month of September 2017.

(In a nutshell, artist residencies provide artists of all types with opportunities to focus on their work in new surroundings, usually in the company of other artists and often with opportunities for presentations or exhibitions. They typically last anywhere from two weeks to six months, and while some come with an award or stipend, most work out similar to a very inexpensive hotel stay. This was the latter type, and I was the only resident with the exception of a photographer and his wife for about a week. The Retreat also caters to tourists, but it was still low season, so there were none at the time.)

This was actually my second residency of that summer. The first was at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, inland from Reykjavik—I’ll have more to say about it in later posts—a great place to explore my passion for volcanic geology and soggy, windswept landscapes. The second was at the opposite pole: yes Iceland and Tasmania are nearly antipodal, but the environments also couldn’t have been much more different, Flinders Island being subtropical and ecologically complex with the ocean ever-present. Given the island’s ecological and botanical diversity, its small size of 30 by 60km (I won’t get into my small-islands obsession here—check out my statement for that!), and admittedly the cushy accommodations, in researching it I thought it sounded too good to be true. But, it wasn’t at all.

Flinders Island has been largely cleared for cattle grazing, though with a population of less than 1000 it has significant pockets of native forest, wetlands, dunelands and scrublands remaining. The largest, most pristine, and most diverse of these is Strzelecki National Park in the southwest corner of the island, containing the island’s tallest peaks. Its elevation and varied topography have produced a stunning mix of ecosystems, from coastal scrub and dry forests to ferny rainforest gullies, cloud forests and rocky summits. The ruggedness of the landscape has kept it safe from deforestation and development, but the Park is and feels like a “sanctuary” in other ways too—some of its habitats are relicts from a period of wetter overall climate, and would be restricted to these mountains even if the entire island had been left untouched by modern humans. I probably don’t need to add that its refuge status is under threat from multiple directions—catastrophic fire (which has ravaged other parts of the island), invasive pests, and a warming/drying climate.

Guestrooms at Mountain Seas.

View into the National Park from my bedroom with usually cloud-obscured Strzelecki Peak (756m) in the center.

Walking trail through streamside forest at Mountain Seas.

Pond, forest and ocean view at Mountain Seas.

Mountain Seas couldn’t be more perfectly situated—right up against the main, mountainous sector of the park and a few minutes’ walk to the much smaller coastal sector (the southern end of it called Trousers Point). Each day for a month I woke to views of the usually cloud-shrouded Strzelecki Peak (756m) and passed through fields of wallabies and wombats and patches of tea tree and tree fern forest on the walk between my room and the Art Centre. Though it was often wet and windy (it was still the tail end of winter), the weather worked with the vegetation to give the landscape a moodiness that I found moving, and there were just enough perfect days to avoid monotony and allow exploration of much of the island by foot, bike and rental car. That, plus the dreamy perfection of my surroundings, and the fact that it was a mostly solitary existence (I encountered fewer than five tourists, and the Retreat’s two staff people were usually elsewhere on the grounds) gave the whole experience a surreal, meditative aspect that rarely comes to me effortlessly, living as I usually do in my head….

Wombat and…

…other deck-dwelling wildlife of Mountain Seas (with the sea in the distance).

One idea I had before arriving was to depict my impression(s) of the entire island by “compressing” its diversity into just one or several compositions—structuring and humanizing it as I’ve done with other islands, real and imaginary. But after doing some exploration I realized that the island didn’t feel compact or “cohesive” enough to provide a starting point for that sort of idealization: it lacked a unifying feature (like a singular mountain range), was too heavily altered, was mostly private inaccessible land, and despite my expectations simply felt too large to really comprehend. So I turned my attention to the National Park—much more manageable in size and in fact—ecologically and psychologically—just as much an “island” itself.

In the next post I’ll say more about the National Park and how my experience of this real-life natural sanctuary culminated in the worldview of that name. For now I’ll share two other works I began during that month (below), imagining the Park as its own literal island as I did for Sanctuary. Both are in a style, set aside for now in favor of the fractured worldviews, consisting of aerial views overlaid with layered laser-cut/etched plexiglass representing topography and waterways. Barnacle Island is much more generic, having been conceived before I studied and explored the Park in detail; Bat Island is much closer to the aerial component of Sanctuary, and depicts the colors of the rocks and vegetation as they appeared at sunset. Take a look at the mixed media gallery for larger images of both.

Stay tuned for more!

Darren

Barnacle Island, watercolor on paper with layered plexiglass, 15”x15”x1”.

Bat Island, watercolor on paper with layered plexiglass, 15”x20”x1”. The plexiglass in the center is layered like a topographical model; on the left side it’s a single layer etched with waterways and topo lines.

The National Park just before sunset, viewed across the lawn at Mountain Seas.

View of Mountain Seas (the most distant cleared area) and the coast from Strzelecki Peak. Trousers Point is hidden by the rock in the upper left.

Strzelecki National Park, with Strzelecki Peak shrouded in cloud, viewed from the beach north of Trousers Point at low tide.

Welcome!

From alpine grassland down to rainforest and farmland, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

Rio de Janeiro from the urban rainforest of Tijuca National Park

Dear readers,

Greetings! And thanks for checking out my worldviews—views of the world that go beyond traditional, disjointed representations of landscape. In doing so they also represent my particular “worldview” (as in a view about the world)—it’s described in depth in my statement, but I’m hoping this blog will go further by relating the works to real-life environmental patterns.

A note about the term “art”—as odd as it sounds, I try not to use it in relation to what I do. I don’t set out to create art objects for their own sake—rather I imagine worlds that I wish were really out there (or idealizations of ones that are), but since even as a landscape architect I can only do so much, objects are my only option. The works are incidental products of a much broader urge. (Now if only I could think of a replacement for “artist”….)

This blog will focus on:

• Connections between completed, in-progress or planned worldviews and actual edges, contrasts and sequences in the natural world and between “natural” and “constructed.” Given that all the works to date, and most of those still in my head, are inspired by places I’ve already visited, I’ll stick mainly to firsthand experiences. (All photographs are mine unless noted otherwise.)

• A more general look at ecological patterns, not necessarily related to specific worldviews but still emphasizing my own travel experiences, with some overview of the science but primarily with an aesthetic and psychological angle.

• General thoughts on edges (physical and metaphorical) between the built and natural environments, including whether we should be thinking of them as separate entities in the first place, and implications for design and conservation especially in this era of rapid environmental change.

Wet and windy páramo (alpine moorland) incongruously bordering farmland, El Ángel, Ecuador

My reasons for the blog are twofold. First, I’m always curious to what degree these interests (obsessions?) and observations are idiosyncratic vs. more widespread. Either way, I believe that nowadays they have implications far beyond my own head and what it produces, so besides creating the works themselves, I see it as my duty to share them as widely as I can. Second, I hope to embark soon on some form of larger writing project (in article or book form) expanding on these ideas, and these posts will help me to get things going.

So in light of all this, please don’t hesitate to leave your comments or questions—I’d love to get some conversations started!

If you aren’t yet receiving automatic email notifications of new posts and would like to, please subscribe at the top of this page, and please contact me using the form if you’d like to be added to my mailing list (since this blog won’t include much in the way of “news”). You can also add me on facebook or instagram (both @darrensears.worldviews) to stay up-to-date on upcoming projects and events.  

Many thanks and more to come soon!

Darren

Volcanic and wild Rangitoto Island seen from suburban Auckland, New Zealand