Julia Watson is an Australian born author, researcher, lecturer, and landscape designer based in New York City. Watson is an expert on traditional and indigenous technologies and focuses her work at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation. Her eponymously named design consultancy foregrounds traditional knowledge, sustainability and nature-based innovation.
Garden Futures – Designing with Nature – 25.03.2023 – 03.10.2023
An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Nieuwe Instituut
Gardens reflect identities, dreams, and visions. Deeply rooted in their culture, they can unfold immense symbolic potential. The recent revival of horticulture has focused less on the garden as a romantic refuge than as a place where concepts of social justice, biodiversity, and sustainability can be tried and tested. Gardens have become places of the avantgarde. The exhibition »Garden Futures« at the Vitra Design Museum is the first to explore the history and future of modern gardens. Where do today’s garden ideals come from? Will gardens help us achieve a liveable future for everyone? The exhibition addresses these questions using a broad range of examples from design, everyday culture, and landscape architecture – from deckchairs to vertical urban farms, from contemporary community gardens to living buildings to gardens by designers and artists including Roberto Burle Marx, Mien Ruys, and Derek Jarman. The exhibition architecture was designed by the Italian design duo Formafantasma.
Flow is a community engagement and participatory art project created and directed by Naoe Suzuki, a visual artist based in the Boston area in Massachusetts, USA.
This project began in 2015. In this project, Naoe asks participants to think about their relationships with water and type their stories using a manual typewriter. In exchange, participants get an original work of art with stories by other people that were retyped. Read More
Michelle Boyle is an artist living and working in the lake-filled landscape of Cavan, Ireland with a developing base in India where her birth father was from. She works in painting and drawing, more recently using video, installation and the written word as part of her creative practice.
Michelle swims year-round in her local lake and this immersive experience has led to her to consider the living agency of fresh water in the landscape and to ask
‘What water would say if it could speak to us?’
As a water scientist and protector, Dr. Kelsey Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policy-making.
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Her work focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings for our shared sustainable future. Dr. Leonard represents the Shinnecock Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America’s ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning, and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for sustainable water and ocean governance. Read More
My work focuses on climate and water. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I would have said climate change is the existential issue of our time. Today I would recast that more broadly—climate change, environmental damage, pollution, profligate overuse of resources, as well as viral outbreaks, are all related to issues of poor human stewardship of our interconnected planet. The connection between environmental issues, environmental justice and the pandemic’s disproportionate effects on the poor and people of color is undeniable. As an artist, I bear witness to what we are losing and imagine ways to mitigate the losses creatively, lovingly and honestly. Read More
Many say that I am obsessed with water. I say, how can I not be? I live in the desert. I need water to survive. Water is a scarce natural resource that plays a critical role in the destiny of humanity and all flora and fauna. Water is beautiful, refreshing, and miraculous. We consume water to sustain our lives and immerse ourselves in water to cleanse our body and soul and awaken our spirit. Pure water is the universal solvent, yet polluted water is the carrier of disease and death. Water quality and scarcity have been a central focus of my work for more than three decades. Typical to my art practice and process, works evolve through in-depth research, personal experiences and my intimate interdependent relationship with nature.
Water is central to life on earth. As Da Vinci said, water is “the earth’s blood.” As a naturalist and painter, I have been painting birth, growth, decay, death and renewal in nature for three decades and find myself drawn to the edges of swamps, ponds, rivers and oceans. I look to water to tell me about the many changes in the environment. water is always changing. As water changes, it changes its environment whether through erosion, flooding, nutrition, or drought. And what we as humans do upstream, will, through the water, affect what happens downstream.
ig: @ilana_manolson
I am a painter, environmental artist and arts writer. I tell stories about the devastation to the land around bodies of water and the bodies of water themselves that have been severely impacted by climate change and by the extraction of water for industrial and agricultural use, and increased human consumption. These factors have caused severe drought, growing desertification and the proliferation of sink holes around the world.
The materials and processes I use include acrylic, oil pigment, satellite images, collage, cyanotype, mono-printing and mixed-media. The surfaces of my paintings are highly textured and offer a physicality that emphasizes the tactile nature of the Earth itself. In the tradition of landscape painters, who for centuries have depicted scenes of specific places, sometimes majestic, sometimes intimate, I am portraying the reality of our contemporary landscapes, which have been dramatically and radically transformed by the climate crisis.
Ecology serves as the conceptual framework of my investigation and maps provide the visual language for my expression. I make prints, drawings, and sculptures that use watersheds as symbols of interconnectedness.
My process leads me into the landscape in multiple ways: walking into the woods and along stream banks awakens an immediate, sensory experience of place; composing images with spatial data provides an expansive and analytical geographic perspective; repetitive mark making opens a meditative path that offers insights gained through time spent with sustained focus. Together, these practices define my creative exploration about how we understand and imagine ourselves in relationship to the natural world.