Dirt Life

2021

Artist Statement

I began studying the microbial world during the Estuary project in ‘04. Wayne Lanier, a field microbiologist, introduced me to marsh life through a field microscope.  What stood out was all the specific shapes and the different modes of swimming: slithering, waving cilia, spinning, flapping, etc.  Nature, with time on her hands, goes wild with possibilities.

In this series I focus on dirt microbial life.  I decided not to try to draw the exact critters living in a particular soil.  Instead I imagined being different shapes and sizes and with different ways of moving and being.  This was a new thing, to just make shit up, and the result made me laugh every time I walked into the studio.  Each piece developed its own microbiome, jumping off the page. They were little circuses entertaining themselves. Now the pieces seem relatively calm, and I’m not sure what happened.  Maybe I need to bury them in the dirt.

Bibliography:

Having engaged with probiotics for decades, I was delighted to read “I Contain Multitudes” by the amazing science writer Ed Yong, who details the extent of the microbiome (bacteria, yeast, fungi, virus) in, on, and around our bodies.  Then a book called “The Hidden Half of Nature” by David R. Montgomery and Anne Bikle` details the life happening in our backyard dirt.  And now “Finding the Mother Tree” is finally out, by Suzanne Simard, scientist extraordinaire, one of the first scientists* to really understand underground relations between trees, in particular via mycorrhizal (fungal) networks.  (*Indigenous wisdom included understandings of interrelationships long ago.)