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Landscape Stories: Art & Ecology Study Abroad Course in Siena

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The Department of Art and the Department of French and Italian are currently accepting applicants for their reoccurring May-semester study abroad to the Siena Art Institute in Italy. This year the course will also include a focus on art and ecology initiatives at SART, like the “Giardino Nascosto” permaculture and artist residency project.

STUDY ABROAD SUMMER SESSION 1, 2026  with Suzanne Silver, ART (silver.22@osu.edu) and Giuliano Migliori, FRIT (migliori.2@osu.edu) 

Landscape Stories: Art and Ecology in Siena

Class Description: Refine artistic, sustainable, and intercultural skills while exploring the cityscapes and cultural heritage narratives of innovation in Siena. A Tuscan hill town that flourished during the Middle Ages, Siena is home to the Sienese School of Painting (Duccio, Lorenzetti, et al) and medieval traditions of performances, and rituals that constantly redefine local landscapes, such as the Palio, a horse race still run each year. Participants have access to a variety of museums, churches, collections, and archives via Ohio State’s partnership with the Siena Art Institute (SART). The creative process of artworks is supported by the study of Siena’s socio-ecological efforts in promoting agro-sustainability and land heritage through eco-artistic discourses. Activities include visits to museums, galleries, collections, agro-ecology farms, eco-art groups, slow food centers, neighborhoods, architectural landmarks, churches, and other historical sites. For more information please contact Marisa Menier at menier.4@osu.edu. Watch our info Session Recording.

 

Siena, view of the Campo from the Archives

Above: Siena, view of the Campo from the Archives

 

 

AU25 Papermaking

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Students dipped their toes into a few small-scale paper making forays across fall semester.

Papermaking Workshop with Art 3024: Word and Image

students making paper by hand in the print studio
students in the print studio making paper by hand
hand made paper drying on large racks

student example of handmade paper
Student example of handmade paper

In September, Suzanne Silver’s Word and Image students made paper with LAEL in the print shop using pulp foraged from invasive plants and print studio scraps. Thanks to Jessie Horning for providing space, and to grad student Jamie Hoy (English Department) for her technical expertise in making paper.

Artist Talk with Papermaker Scout Ery

people gathered around a table looking at papermaking equipment and samples
A flyer for a visiting artist talk with Barbara "Scout" Ery. Font is black with white outline. the background is an up-close image of a paper mulberry tree's leaves. to the right, there is a square with an up-close image of the artist's face. She is an older white woman wearing black glasses with black grey hair.

On November 7th, Scout Ery shared her journey as a papermaker, starting with her apprenticeship under a master papermaker and culminating in her most recent Kozo (paper mulberry) harvest this fall. We were excited to see students from across Art, Dance, and Landscape Architecture attend this event to learn more about this artform!

(Left: photo of the artist talk flyer; Above: Scout shows students samples of mulberry paper and papermaking equipment)

Corn Paper from Stalk to Sheet

invasive plant papermaking flyer

Throughout the semester, a small project ran to attempt making paper pulp from feed corn husks and leaves. This labor intensive process began with shucking corn from a rotational crop field (with permission from the farmers), after which it was shredded, cooked down, and beaten until reaching the desired consistency. Grad student Jamie Hoy (English Department) led this process, and pulp was prepared in LAEL on October 29th for students to experiment in creating their own paper sheets.

person hanging corn paper on a window to dry

person standing in front of corn field in pink shirt
hands removing corn husk from stalks in front of corn field
bins of corn husk and leaves
hands pressing a sheet of corn paper to transfer it from the mould and deckle
person fishing for corn pulp with mould and deckle

Top: Jamie dries sheets of corn paper on the Living Art and Ecology Lab window overlooking the Oval; Middle: three stills of harvesting corn husks with permission from a local feed corn plot; Bottom: Student practices pulling sheets of paper from corn husk paper vat in the Living Art and Ecology Lab. Final 5 photos courtesy of Jamie Hoy.

Call for Applications: May Field Course “Regional Relations” (Art 5890)

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Department of Art Faculty and LAEL Working Group Members Dionne Lee and Dani ReStack will be leading a May semester field course this summer, titled Regional Relations.

Course Description:

Split into two parts, this course consists of a two-week field season (5/7-5/20) through Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky followed by a studio intensive in response to research conducted in the field. Our travels and study will coalesce around ideas of foreignness and belonging through engagement with Indigenous, Black, and Appalachian histories and contemporary frameworks, regional ecology, feminist geographies, animal welfare, and the relationship between human intervention and the evolving nature of our planet. We will visit regional forests, sites of ecological catastrophe, coal mines, “livestock” farms, the bell hooks center, and more. Throughout the field season the class will lodge outdoors, camping in national and regional parks.

Students will engage with interdisciplinary site responses through seminars, writing, discussion, critical looking and art modalities: image making, sound recordings, video, recording observations in sketchbooks, etc. Following the course will be a class presentation/exhibition in fall 2025.

To Apply: Submit a short essay (~600 words) describing how this course and collaborative learning experience would impact your research to instructors Dionne Lee (lee.10163@osu.edu) and Dani ReStack (restack.1@osu.edu) by March 1.

Who Should Apply: This class is interdisciplinary at its core. We welcome art and non-art students alike who find this course to be in alignment with their research.

Please note this class will require camping, moderate to strenuous hiking, setting up camp, and cooking meals together.

This field course is made possible through the support of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Field School initiative

Those Who Feed Us: Open Call for Art

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Open call for art flyer for the show "those who feed us" in celebration of ohio soil health week 2024

Join the Living Art and Ecology Lab in celebrating Ohio Soil Health Week through this open call for work! This short exhibition of juried and invited artists seeks to appreciate those who feed us through building and maintaining our soils. We invite you to submit work that explores soil as community: from microbes and mycelium, to plants and people, and beyond. Artists working in all mediums are welcome to apply.

Applications are due by October 20th at 11:59pm.  Link to apply, and additional information on the show, can be found here.

We Are Hiring Students!

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The Living Art and Ecology Lab is Hiring!

We are looking for ten undergraduate students to assist on two interdisciplinary research projects this year.

Photo of the Lichen Likers student-faculty group from last year, pictured with a 3D lichen model they created using augmented reality

Learning Lichen is an artistic research project supported by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme of Care, Culture, and Justice.  The project aims to promote public awareness of the valuable relationship between humans, non-humans, and our shared environment through combining art and science practices. This project is a continuation of the Lichen Likers project from 2024, which you can learn about here: https://u.osu.edu/lichen/. We are hiring six (6) Student Research Assistants to collaborate with faculty and staff in exploring the topic described above. Four (4) student assistants will focus on workshop development and art research while two (2) will focus on the media design through digital documentation and storytelling. Faculty Advisors for this project are Amy Youngs and Doo-sung Yoo in the Department of Art.

Link to Apply: https://www.myworkday.com/osu/d/inst/15$151691/9925$254268.htmld

 

Lost Waters is a collaborative project to investigate changes to the South Oval Landscape across time, centering around the disappearance of Neil Run stream in the 1890s. Two teams of students will be hired to assist on this project: one focused on researching changes to the landscape, and the other focused on using this data to create an Augmented Reality artwork visualizing these changes. This research and artwork will help contextualize modern environmental conditions on campus, focusing on how hydrological changes have impacted ecosystem services and local biodiversity. This project is supported by an Ohio State Energy Partners (OSEP) grant. Faculty Advisors for this project are Amy Youngs (Department of Art) and Jake Boswell (Landscape Architecture).

Link to Apply (Landscape Research): https://www.myworkday.com/osu/d/inst/15$392530/9925$254253.htmld

Link to Apply (Art and Tech): https://www.myworkday.com/osu/d/inst/15$151691/9925$254221.htmld

 

To apply to these projects or to learn more about each position, students should follow the links provided. You will be asked to enter your OSU login credentials to access the job postings.

 

The deadline to apply to these positions is listed as August 21st, but we may continue to accept applications until the end of the month.

 

Any questions can be sent to the Living Art and Ecology Lab Specialist Emma Kline at Kline.434@osu.edu.

 

Watch Fungal Entanglement: A Lichen Journey

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Fungal Entanglement: A Lichen Journey, was a participatory performance led by the Lichen Likers art research group. We gathered people on the Ohio State University campus and took them on a journey to visit lichens and learn about their lifestyles. We brought the entire fungal entanglement to the Biological Sciences Greenhouse for an Earth Day art exhibition, In a Hotter House, that included work by the Lichen Likers, students in the Art & Science course (co-taught by faculty members Iris Meier and Amy Youngs), and seven invited local artists.

Credits:

Fungal Entanglement artists: Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, Jiara Sha, Doo-sung Yoo, and Amy Youngs.

In a Hotter House exhibition curated by Doo-sung Yoo and Amy Youngs

Artists: Skylar Albright, Anna Arbogast, Marcia Armstrong, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Madalyn Bunjevac, Al Dilorenzo, John Cairns, Ben Chang, Megan Fabro, Andie Goodes, Taylor Green, Xiuer Gu, Brennan Jones, Olga Kisseleva and Lilia Chak, Eric Homan, Bethany Marple, Elias Marquez, Andrew Mehall, Caroline Mosholder, Zoe November, Ivan David Ng, Takahiro Okubo, Dev Patel, Noor Quadri, Bakhahang Rai, Mural Remix, Jonathan Riles, Ken Rinaldo, CG Ryan, Bella Saraceni, Lily Schumacher, Sabrina Sedlacko, Jiara Sha, Avery Stratman, Kaika Wakabayashi, Thomas Winningham, Andrew Wood, Uriah Wright, Doosung Yoo, Amy Youngs, Barry Yuan, and Danny Zhang.

Video: Jordan Sommerlad

Music: “Aurora”, by Anemoia. creative commons license cc by-nc-sa

Project support: The Ohio State University’s Humanities Institute, the Living Art and Ecology Lab of the Department of Art, the Biological Sciences Greenhouse, and the Department of Molecular Genetics.

April Workshops: Plant Dye Bandanas with Time for Change

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April 2nd and April 3rd: Plant Dye Bandanas with Time for Change Week

 

Time for Change Week is an OSU Signature Event with the purpose of raising awareness for topics relating to sustainability on campus. The Living Art and Ecology Lab hosted two bandana dyeing workshops as part of this year’s festivities. During this event, students used resist techniques to dye bandanas with two historically significant dye plants: indigo and madder root. Enjoy some photos of the student work below!

Bandana reveals from the indigo vat

Madder root dye bath and a madder bandana over-dyed with indigo

Two madder bandanas: one treated with alum and acorn-based tannin solution; another with alum alone

 

Thank you to Time for Change organizers for including the LAE LAB in this years events!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April Workshops: Mycelium Sculpture with Visiting Artist Kate Klingbeil

up close look at inoculated sawdust
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April 5th: Mycelium Sculpture with Visiting Artist Kate Klingbeil

crowd of students gathered for mycelium workshop with visiting artist Kate Klingbeil

We had a wonderful crowd in attendance for Kate Klingbeil’s visiting artist talk and sculpture workshop! OSU staff, students, faculty, and community members gathered in the print shop during this event to learn the practice of sculpting with mycelium. Klingbeil, whose work often focuses on celebrating the unseen realm of soil, was drawn to explore this medium for creation as a way of working in partnership with the more than human world. These pieces are a collaboration between the fungi and the sculptor to realize the final product.

 

image of a student mold sculpture; filled with inoculated substrate and shaped from cardboard and other waste stream materials

 

Sculpting with mycelium involves the creation of a mold that can be filled with substrate (sawdust, rice bran, etc) inoculated in fungal spawn. As the fungi grow, their mycelium spreads throughout the substrate to act as a ‘glue’, resulting in a form that will hold its shape once removed from the mold. Local waste stream materials– like takeout containers, empty bottles, and cardboard boxes– were provided to participants to make mold shapes. Substrates included soybean chaff, sawdust, hemp hurds, straw, and more. Examples of a student mold (left) and one created by the artist (right) can be seen above.

 

image of pots and pans in a sink, all full of sterilized substrate materials for using to build mycelium sculptures (eg, sawdust, straw, soybean chaff, etc)
Photo of the ‘Substrate Bar’ full of different materials for growing mycelium and filling our molds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you to Kate for sharing this innovative artistic technique and letting us be part of your fungal network! Anyone interested in organizing a similar workshop with Kate should reach out to her at kateklingbeil@gmail.com. Participant photos from the event can also be submitted to this google form.

 

We have many people to thank for the execution of this wonderful event. Thank you to Jessie Horning and the Print Studio for providing space for this event to occur. Thank you to Natasha Woods and the Graduate Student Art Club for arranging this visiting artist. Thank you to the Feminist Research, Education, and Engagement (FREE) Center  for providing additional funding for workshop materials.
Thank you to the following local partners for donating substrate materials for students to use in this workshop as well: The Cannabis Museum in Athens, Ohio (hemp hurds), Woodcraft on Bethel Road (sawdust), and the McHale Soybean Breeding Program on Waterman Farm (soybean chaff).

Introducing Artist-in-Residence Doo-Sung Yoo

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Meet the Artist 

This past semester the Living Art and Ecology Lab welcomed its first artist in residence, Doo–Sung Yoo. Doo–Sung is a Korean new media artist and a lecturer here at Ohio State University. His work focuses on the interface between the living and non-living aspects of our world. As he describes in the artist statement on his website,

“I create environments in which living entities and biological materials, including the human body, are combined with technological systems. In these environments, my hybrid sculptural and interactive entities mediate the confluence between triangular oppositions of human-animal-technological nature, and blur their boundaries. My artwork is based on those intersections between natural and unnatural technology. I explore aesthetic possibilities of ‘interspecies’ and ‘interanimation’ through human relationships with non-human others within my artistic forms.”

Artist-in-Residence Doo-Sung Yoo in the field, photographing lichen on a tombstone

Doo–Sung’s previous works have been exhibited, reviewed, and published in spaces such as Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (USA), Life After Literature: Perspectives on Biopoetics in Literature and Theory (Switzerland), Tierstudien (Germany), Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (England), Art and Speculative Futures International Conference 2016 (Spain), Bodies on Stage: Acting Confronted by Technology 2015 (France), Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture (Canada), Intertekst (Poland), and Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age (Russia).

Residency Activities

During his residency with the Living Art and Ecology Lab, Doo–Sung has been working alongside OSU Art and Tech faculty Amy Youngs and undergraduate research interns Anna Arbogast, Nathan Tyler, Elias Marquez, Xiuer Gu, and Madison Blue to investigate the lives of lichen. Collectively, this group refers to themselves as the Lichen Likers. Projects and events from this group so far include a ‘lichen garden’ outside of Hopkins Hall, a guest lecture from emeritus professor Robert Klips on lichen natural history, and a virtual reality project to create larger than life models of lichen from 3D specimen scans, among many others.

Doo-Sung standing under an augmented reality model of a lichen specimen. This model was made by the Lichen Likers group as a part of their fall research activities.

Lichen Likers will continue to host workshops moving forward, providing space for our human art communities to observe and learn from lichens. They will lead creative activities centered around these symbiotic organisms, with the goal of conceptualizing better ways for including non-human beings in our making practices. Stay tuned to hear more from this group as they continue to embrace the more-than-human world in their craft. A new group of interns will join this project in spring semester, as Doo–Sung’s residency continues through the end of this academic year.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to the lab Doo–Sung!

Workshop Series: Lichen Creation & Ideation

| Amy Youngs

The Lichen Likers* of the Living Art & Ecology Lab will host the second workshop in our series. We are artists learning with lichens, observing and experiencing their symbiotic lifestyle, conceptualizing, and practicing respectful, creative activities with lichens. In this workshop, we invite you to join us in five different hands on activities involving observing, drawing, ideating, mediating, and creating with lichen – in ways that do not harm them.

* The Lichen Likers art research group includes art faculty Doosung Yoo and Amy Youngs and art students Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, and Nate Tyler.

Follow Lichen Likers on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lichenlikers