Eco Art – Amy Youngs

Pine Needle Forest, Marcia Armstrong

  • can existing biomass be repurposed into a viable growing medium with minimal environmental/human impact?
  • can seeds germinate from a substrate of pine needle mulch?
  • can we move forward by looking back into past practices and cultures?

Materials: birch plywood boxes, glass front panels, mini clover, microgreens, wheatgrass, prairie grass, pine needle pulp substrate, pine needle tea.

 

Dreaming of Place and Dreaming in Place, Emma Kline
The ecosystems around us are the ones that are tangible, and yet our idea of what constitutes nature worth saving comes from images of places we’ve never met. How can we design solutions to our environmental problems when our attention is somewhere outside of our bodies? Materials: National Geographic magazines from my childhood; muslin dyed with materials foraged along the Olentangy river, including Red and White Oak Gall, Red Oak Acorn, Black Walnut, and scrap metal (iron).

 

Eco Centric Beauty Standards, Antwan Holland
Colonization has taken root in many aspects of our society without us even realizing. Blindly following, we have lost the beauty that is achievable when diversity is allowed to flourish. In order to fully realize the beauty in the world, we must embrace the beauty that lies within the uncontrollable and redefine standards of presentability.

 

Rat Backpack, Lilly Rakas
An exercise in framing the non-human. A pleasurable experience for rat and human alike.

 

Decomposers, Bilal Khan
The setting takes place in the far future where humans discovered a planet to be a dumping ground for waste. Unlike the organisms on earth, these creatures can consume and recycle our waste materials.

 

Three Degrees, Jihyun Lee
Three Degrees
manifests the food crisis that will come in the future due to environmental pollution. Materials displayed from dark to light, from big to small imply the situation that those become hard to come by gradually. Materials: legumes, rice, salt, dried flower

 

Looking for Lilies, Kaisa Cameron
An installation for bringing water lily flowers into the wetlands. I used crocheting to try diving into yarn bombing in water. The spectacular views and general vibe provided by the wetlands at The Ohio State University had to be brought some more attention to.  Materials: Giant flower crocheted with handmade rope made out of cotton twine, handmade puff ball dyed with turmeric food coloring, wine corks, and shellac.

 

Urban Nature Areas, Colin Moreland
A performance and installation piece involving setting up fictional nature preserves that are focused on wild plants present in urban areas.

 

Monument, Alejandro Peregrina and Trevor McNutt
This 400+ pound pyramid of dirt had one side had planted mushroom spores, one side with planted grass, and one side with moss. This monument was made to show off the beauty of simple nature that can normally be overlooked in the form of an unnatural monumental shape. Materials: Dirt, compost, coconut coir, found sticks, moss, grass seed, and mushroom spores

 

Biosphere 3 / Moving On, Trevor McNutt
I was inspired by how fascinated I am by the idea of moving to space and living in a colony. However, I have realized that more and more recently that the reason for moving to the last true frontier is not one that is out of freedom, but out of necessity.

 

Future Farm, Joshua Lee
To try to imagine what might happen to our environment if we continue to be greedy and inconsiderate of our resources. How might our landscape change? How might our way of life change as well? We might end up like these Future Farms. Empty and looking back on what was.

 

Grow, Decompose, Repeat, Lucia Perfumo
This a flowing piece that reflects the cycle of leaves in which they land on the ground, decompose, and provide nutrients for the trees to grow and create more leaves. The act of sewing the leaves together becomes an intimate experience where the shapes and textures of each leaf become prevalent. Sewing the leaves also creates a relationship with the time it takes for the leaves to realize its cycle. Materials: Leaves, Thread, Twine. Installed at The Chadwick Arboretum North

 

Framing the Non-Human, Marcia Armstrong, Emma Kline, Ada Huang, Amanda Hsieh, and Amy Youngs worked together to create this Dead Branch Pavilion at the Ohio State University’s Chadwick Arboretum North, for the art assignment: Framing the Non-Human. Materials: Dead sticks and branches found on the ground and a Bushnell motion activated wildlife camera.