 Mary in her Manitowish Waters studio. She dyed this shawl using materials she collected near her third generation home on the Manitowish River Mary Burns believes that water is sacred. A textile artist and weaver, Mary lives on the banks of the Manitowish River, in the cabin that once belonged to her grandparents. She said that the cabin, and the river that runs beside it, are the sites of some of her earliest memories. “I think people really feel drawn to water, and it means a lot to people, whether it is a sense of belonging, or a sense of serenity,” Mary said. “I think there is a magnetic pull to water for most people.” Her own connection to water has inspired her throughout her career as a weaver. Now, she hopes that a residency at Trout Lake Station will give her the opportunity to explore that relationship — as well as the role of women as environmental stewards — further. She imagines her residency taking the form of a series of woven portraits, featuring women who are leaders in water science and stewardship, paired with weavings of freshwater landscapes. She also plans to extract natural dyes from those landscapes. “I think that women working in limnology are essential. I would like to bring their expertise into this discussion,” Mary said. “I would like the exhibit to broaden people’s knowledge our water problems and encourage people to take action.” Tentatively, she will title the collection The Living Water. The series will expand on a project that Mary has been working on for the past several years. Called Ancestral Women, that series included 12 woven portraits of native women and 12 landscapes. The collection resulted from a collaboration between Mary and tribal communities across Wisconsin. “Women are life givers, and in many native societies, they are the water protectors,” Mary explained. “I started working with native women on this because it seemed to me that they should be honored first.”  A portrait of water walker Josephine Mandamin. Weavings from both series line the walls of Mary’s airy studio. “This is Josephine Mandamin,” Mary said, gesturing toward a grey-tone image of an older woman carrying a copper pot. It's one of the first pieces Mary has competed as part of Living Water. Josephine, Mary explained, began the Water Walk Movement, an effort lead by native women to advocate for freshwater conservation. Josephine has walked over 15,000 miles to raise awareness for water. “She is tremendously inspirational to me,” Mary said. The portrait of Josephine, took Mary over a month to complete. Mary has been weaving since high school, but Ancestral Women was the first time she had ever attempted portraiture in that medium. But weaving, she said, was the best way for her to share these stories. “Bringing these stories to life in weaving is a gift I have been given,” Mary said. “I think that people relate to it and are amazed by it. It’s a textile, and people are drawn to that. It’s something basic, it connects to everybody and it’s something that can be touched.” Mary said she chose to design the the portraits in grey tones because color would have distracted from the stories she wanted the weavings to tell. “I think the monochrome is more powerful,” she said. “The minimalism contains complexity.”  Mary works on a sample for a current project. She can use up to 1300 warp threads at one time Mary's jacquard loom stands in the back corner of her studio, near a window overlooking a garden bursting with the indigo she uses to dye silks. Even when she reduces her palette to a few colors, the weaving process is incredibly complicated. Mary works with 1,300 warp threads at any time, and she controls each individually. She navigates between 4,000 weave structures to create the perfect shading and textures in her pieces. While Mary said she hopes her work conveys her gratitude for Wisconsin’s abundant freshwater systems, she also hopes that it inspires stewardship of them, and cautions audiences that the state’s resources cannot be taken for granted. Particularly, she sees agricultural and industrial runoff and mining as threats to Wisconsin’s waterways. When she weaves, she said it is with that thankfulness — but also those worries — in mind. Mary will be working at Trout Lake station throughout the summer and fall as she completes her residency. Check back often to see more of her completed work. To view more of Mary's weavings, please visit her website.
27 Comments
 Zooplankton of the Great Lakes illustrates some of the microorganisms Artist in Residence Rebecca Jabs saw during her explorations of Trout Lake  Crystal Bog, a second painting inspired by Rebecca's Trout Lake residency, showcases the diverse lifeforms found in bog ecosystems By Sydney Widell
When Rebecca Jabs, Trout Lake Station’s 2017 Artist in Residence, arrived on station, she was captivated by the series of old photographs that hang in its main lab. In the photographs, which date back to the early 1900s, men dressed in suits haul long nets through the water off the sides of boats. They were looking, she was told, for zooplankton, or the microscopic animals that drift through the water. As a science illustrator, these photographs and stories captured Rebecca’s imagination. So, when Carl Watras, a DNR researcher based at Trout Lake, offered to take her on the lake to cast nets of her own, she said yes. Back at the lab, Rebecca studied the samples she’d taken under a microscope, and what she saw amazed her. The tiniest drops of water were teeming with life — colonies of translucent zooplankton floating in and out of her field of view. “They are such an important part of our ecosystem,” Rebecca said. “We never even think about them when we are swimming or near water, but they’re there.” Rebecca said her visions under the microscope inspired her as she began to paint. The resulting artwork, Zooplankton of the Great Lakes, is a digital painting that illustrates some of the species she collected at Trout Lake. A year later, one copy of that painting hangs at Trout Lake Station. The other is on its way to Washington, D.C., where it will be featured at the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators’ 50th Anniversary Conference next month. “It is a pretty big honor to be selected for that exhibit,” Rebecca said. A second piece by Rebecca, also inspired by her residency, is on display at Trout Lake now as well. The gouache landscape Crystal Bog, widens the minute perspective she used to approach Zooplankton of the Great Lakes and is a departure from the hyper-realistic style that characterizes most of her work. “A bog is a pretty magical place,” Rebecca said. “If you’re walking through a woods, it’s more familiar. But then you step out into this opening and there are these strange plants and squishy ground covered with sphagnum moss and enclosed by tamarack all the way around the edge — I wanted to recreate that feeling.” But Rebecca also realized that feeling is something not everyone gets to experience. That’s part of the reason she said she chose to paint Crystal Bog as a landscape and to feature as many plants as she could. Normally, she said she paints her subjects without background context, which is more typical of science illustration. “If you’ve never been to Crystal Bog, it’s not easy to find your way there,” Rebecca said. “You don’t know where you’re going. But I remember feeling so excited to learn the name and characteristics of every plant I saw, and I was asking a lot of questions and thumbing through guide books as I tried to give everything a name and a place in my understanding of what a bog is.” Rebecca said she often uses art to achieve that understanding. “I wanted to learn more and the way I make art is always such an incredible learning process,” Rebecca said. “Once I render something, I’m reading about it and learning so much about it. That way I really get to know my subjects — I’ve spent so much time studying and drawing them.” Rebecca has only been working as a science illustrator since 2016, but it’s something she said she’s always imagined herself doing. Before she returned to school to pursue that dream, she taught art in the Wisconsin Public School System. In many ways, she said her roles as a teacher and a science illustrator are similar. “Science illustration is a form of education,” Rebecca said. “You’re bringing concepts to life, essentially. Education is central to what i’m doing.” Zooplankton of the Great Lakes and Crystal Bog were not painted as a set, Rebecca said. However, she still sees them working in tandem to express the larger relationships that connect freshwater ecosystems. “Every aspect of limnology is interconnected and I really appreciated learning how factors all influence each other,” Rebecca said. “So in that respect, both of them catalogue different species of a particular environment. They are not completely unrelated, although they are not intended as a connected set of pieces.” Following her exhibit in Washington, D.C., Rebecca will be opening a show at the UW-Madison Arboretum’s Steinhauer Trust Gallery, beginning Sept. 9. To see more of Rebecca's work, please visit her website |
RSS Feed
