Art History 4020: Art & Ecology focused on fieldwork and embodied experience as research methods to move beyond text and image-based research. The creative and contemplative practices represented in this exhibition emphasized making with an environmental partner such as soil, sun, and a waterway. The course approached art history as a transdisciplinary creative research practice to explore new ways of thinking, knowing, and being in relation.

Visiting artist Rachel Parish led creative practices that were informed by study of the co-evolution of ecological thought and ecological art with Instructor Courtney Taylor. A meditative nature connection experience in which students captured a Polaroid, noted in one word their experience, and then submerged the image in water gathered from an LSU lake opened the course.

Collaborative projects included a soil core representing each students’ engagement with three sites familiar to them. From this soil, each student created soil chromatography prints, clay sculptural elements, and field notes reflecting on their site, the material engagement, and their embodied experience. Sun drawings engaged students in slow, durational observation and documentation while concrete poems turned merged poetic reflection with image-making.

Finally, an individual “Co-creation with a Waterway” project, featured on the wings of the gallery, encouraged students to engage a familiar waterway over a period to make with their chosen site.