Joelle Cicak

Joelle Cicak used her Land Line residency to research the entanglements that occur within the steppe biomes represented at Denver Botanic Gardens. Exploring the delicate connections between plants and animals, Cicak’s work captures how these interactions build a foundation upon which we all may thrive. Her research at the Gardens aided the creation of ceramic sculpture displaying the interchange of life within ecosystems, celebrating the intricate interactions between different plant species and the ways in which they combine to wondrous ends.   

About the Artist

Joelle Cicak grew up against a stretch of forest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she learned at a young age the intricacies that exist between humans and the environment. Her undergraduate education at Dickinson College focused on art practices and classical studies. Because of this, she often uses mythology to aid her thoughts on nature, memory and the connection between past and present, personal and public. She received her MFA in ceramics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She focuses deeply on both her relationship with the natural world, as well as the cultural ideas that both bind us to and separate us from it. 

Kyle Cornish

Kyle Cornish used the Land Line residency to collect visual source material from Denver Botanic Gardens’ modern and archival collections of specimens. Cornish’s perspective illuminates the role of race and identity in the experience of nature. The resulting collage artworks honor the Gardens’ mission to connect people with plants and celebrate abundance and community.

About the Artist

Kyle Cornish is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores nature, Black identity and queer community in the Anthropocene.  

Eloisa Guanlao

Eloisa Guanlao’s versatile art practice explores nature’s complex relationship with humans. For the Land Line residency, Guanlao created works including a sewn replica of a woodpecker that kept her company at the Plains Conservation Center (PCC), and infrared photographs taken at Chatfield Farms and the PCC. These photographs are part of Guanlao’s Hearth Series, capturing places that contain resources for survival and represent hearth and home to the organisms that inhabit that area. 

About the Artist

 

Born in the Philippines, Eloisa Guanlao’s experiences as an immigrant and nomadic scholar-artist influence her versatile art practice and critical inquiries. With an interest in the natural world, history, art, languages and literature, she considers art making a social and cultural endeavor and pursues projects that are research intensive and relevant to current issues. Eloisa Guanlao attended the Los Angeles High School for the Arts, Carleton College in Minnesota, and received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. Guanlao practices and teaches art in California.

Laura Ahola-Young

Using precise research and study of plant physiology, Laura Ahola Young explores the scientific structures of plants. Her meticulous paintings often feature complex patterns and labored marks. During her residency, she created paintings that explore how an organism’s appearance is informed by its adaptations for survival.

About the Artist

Laura Ahola-Young develops work that incorporates scientific research, the Pacific Northwest and personal narrative. Originally from northern Minnesota, she has been influenced by landscapes, winters, ice and resilience. Ahola-Young received her MFA from San Jose State University in 2001 and currently resides in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is associate professor of art at Idaho State University. 

Laura Fantini

Laura Fantini’s hyper-realistic works inspire reconnection with nature through observation of the beauty and the astounding detail of the natural world. The artworks created for the Land Line residency were made using seedpods from Denver Botanic Gardens’ own living collections as reference. For Fantini, seeds are powerful symbols of optimism and the infinite possibility of new beginnings.

About the Artist

Laura Fantini is an artist working in a hyper-realistic minimalist manner, living and working in both Brooklyn, New York, and Bologna, Italy. She specializes in colored pencil still-life defined by strong contrast and dramatic lighting. She graduated from the Liceo Artistico and Academy of Fine Arts in her hometown of Bologna. Fantini's art has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries and art institutions and has been widely published and documented. She has won various awards, including The Canson Paper Award for Excellence and the Award for Exceptional Merit from the Colored Pencil Society of America. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh and at the Queens Botanical Garden in New York. 

Lauren Camp

With an interest in ecology, Lauren Camp’s work focuses on the dangers plaguing the environment—shifting climate, increasing desertification and wildfires. During her Land Line residency, she searched for positive outcomes within our changing environment, looking at the plants most appropriate to our changing climate and ever-increasing aridity. The resulting poems reckon with the ways that nature recharges the land, and what has the courage to stretch and bloom. 

About the Artist

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently “Took House” (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Ecotone, Poet Lore and “Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology,” and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. She is a recipient of fellowships from Black Earth Institute and The Taft Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and North American Book Award. She lives in New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages.