Anna Arbogast is a queer artist working in Columbus, Ohio. She lives on her grandparents’ farm-where she had spent her childhood-in a rural, working-class area north of the city. Anna’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and fabric works are a means of exploring their family’s history along with the complexities of love, loss, faith, and care. Anna graduated from the Ohio State University in 2024 with degrees in Natural Resource Management and Art. She is interested in the history of land and how human culture influences ecological change throughout time. She believes that all people are citizens of a wilderness that is simultaneously ancient and ever-changing.
Lichen Learning
In my role as an environmental science student, I was aware of lichen. At least enough to passively notice its presence on my forays around campus and in the parks that I would frequent. The Lichen Research and Art Project encouraged me to not only look at lichens more closely, but to also ask what they might say if they were given a voice. What could they teach us?
I began to consider the significance of these organisms. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, I saw lichens as quiet witnesses to the passage of geologic time, as world builders, and as examples of symbiotic community. Lichen are incredibly old organisms and bravely colonize the inhospitable surface of bare rock. They tend to invite more life, eventually becoming a soil base in which seeds might survive.
I believe that lichen’s humble resilience and slow existence is one of the greatest lessons it has to teach. Sitting with lichen, taking the time to learn its name (which is quite hard to do sometimes), and remembering that the same colony that now creeps across modern buildings and street signs also survived on glacial boulders is a practice in patience and a reminder that our lives-as grand and important as they might feel to us-pale in comparison to the history of lichen.
I see the community of artists and scientists built within this project as a reflection of that within lichen. While we sought to learn from lichen, we spent hours learning from and supporting one another.
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