I work at the intersection of art and commerce, digital and analog, personal identity and dominant cultural systems, creating experiences and exchanges that invite everyday people to deconstruct and reinvent the systems they encounter. Read More
Subjectivity and objectivity oscillate in interesting ways when one looks closely at the natural systems that make up our world. Aspects that may at first appear fixed and unchanged by the human world take on personal and fungible features when closely observed. This has been my experience in my investigations of trees, wind and most significantly, water.
Much of my artwork begins with a quasi-scientific approach. I measure volumes and speeds and depths and so on, creating lists of data from which I build projects. That information, which is for the most part taken as objectively as possible, gives shape to my sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs.
Lisa Reindorf combines knowledge from architecture and environmental science in her artwork. Her paintings examine the environmental impact of climate change on water. In aerial view landscapes, she creates interpretations of coastal areas – in particular rising seas and sinking cities.
There is an inherent conflict between nature and building. Built architectural systems are often intrusive and not in harmony with the environment. Nature responds with floods, storm surges and rising seas. Although this presents a pessimistic commentary on global warming, the artist feels that building more in harmony with natural water systems can ameliorate the deleterious effects on both systems.
As a writer for art publications she comments on art and environmental issues. She is also a visiting artist at universities and frequent lecturer on how artists interpret climate change.
what is ecoartspace?
ecoartspace has served as a platform for artists addressing environmental issues since 1999. Patricia Watts and Amy Lipton have curated over 60 art and ecology exhibitions combined, and have organized, as well as participated in, over 100 ecoart programs and events.
Starting 2020, Watts decided to transition to a membership-based organization. Students, artists, advocates, professionals, galleries and institutions are invited to join who are concerned about the natural world. Together, we as a community can both imagine and help make real, a healthy future.
I’ve always felt there is a healing element in moving water. Many years ago after a surgery, I went to the ocean to heal. The wide open spaces and beaches were relaxing, but I believe it was the water flowing in and out that helped me recover. That experience inspired my series of paintings I called Sea and Sky.
We are 60 percent water; Earth’s surface is 71 percent water; while water sustains us, and even IS us, our carelessness can turn it into an agent of our destruction. Throughout my working life, I’ve done performances, political activities, and skywriting about water and it’s importance our species and to the planet as a whole. Currently, I’m an image-maker, concerned with rivers as the veins and lifelines of the planet, and seas as the vast, living repositories of time, memory, the detritus of our habitation, as well as an embodiment of existential terror. I’m using iridescent textural materials — beads, tapestry threads, foil refuse — to suggest the physicality and reflective quality of water, beautiful, threatening, and threatened.
MY COMMITMENT TO WATER:
My practice at the intersection of art, science and the environment targets issues of climate change. Thus, water is integral to this focus.
Throughout the many decades of my career, bodies of water, (primarily observed from above) have fascinated me – from oceans along the coasts of California, Maine, Nova Scotia to Europe and Iceland. Rivers have been another source of inspiration, most particularly in the 1980’s when working on the Waterways of Pennsylvania project. The Bayous of Louisiana, the Everglades of Florida, as well as the Geddes run creek on my Bucks County property have fed my photography and painting practice.
Forty years ago, Betsy Damon stepped outside her traditional art training and carved a unique path to work with the environment, communities, science and art. She began looking to her inner consciousness as a source of inspiration which initiated her public engagement, starting with gritty art performances on the New York City streets. She was engaged in the women’s movement of the 1970s, where she founded No Limits for Women Artists, a network to join and support female artists.
People often think that nature ends where the city begins. My projects are designed to allow a site within the built environment to tell its ecological story to the people that inhabit it. As a sculptor, my interest in the natural world rests both in art and science. I use art as a vehicle for translating the patterns and processes of the natural world.
In my practice, I search for sites that provide the opportunity to make visible some of the forces at work on the site. Interested in watersheds, tides, growth and erosion, I make projects that show how nature functions in an urban setting. My previous projects have been about invisible microorganisms and their complicated relationships of eating and being eaten; spiraling hydrological patterns of a stream, mosaic of growth in a vacant lot, prevailing winds and their effects on vegetation, the flow of rainwater through a building.
Artist Statement
I collaborate with local communities around the world to focus on important water issues, especially rivers, waterborne diseases, water scarcity, and climate disruption. I work closely with scholars from numerous disciplines building rainwater harvesting systems; connecting communities and fostering dialogue along the entire length of rivers; filming and producing water documentaries; launching hand-carved ice books embedded with seeds into waterways; and creating waterborne disease projects, most recently in Egypt, Ethiopia, India, and Nepal. My working process occurs out in the field along streams and creeks.