0
items
$0
STATEMENT:
My work uses printmaking, writing, and drawing to investigate how landscapes change over time, and how we shape, respond to, and talk about these changes. I carve botanically accurate linoleum prints of so-called invasive plant species: tansy and mullein, bittersweet and buckthorn and more. I combine these prints with salvaged textiles to construct large-scale installations of cut and sewn layers. With intricate hand-stitching, knotting and joining, I engage in a ritual of mending.
In my research, I study the cultural context that frames plants as enemy combatants. Bearing witness to loss, I notice which plants thrive under impossible conditions, and which plants struggle to cope. I study the impossible conditions, and I study the entwined reactions of plants and humans.
This work is timely; rooted in ecology, it unveils the divisive cultural projections placed on plants. Those of us who care for ecosystems often defend their threatened status within the framework of war, competition, borders and anti-immigration. Such language justifies the use of toxic herbicides and costly control measures within shrinking tracts of undeveloped land. While these measures poison everyone’s soil and water (oaks, buckthorn, microbiota and humans alike), they do not stop the escalating loss of habitat or the cultural addiction to resource extraction. Meanwhile, this framework reinforces an authoritarian approach to controlling beings who are struggling to cope, adapt, and survive in the face of rapid change and loss.
These lush tapestries are designed to respond by enfolding viewers in complexity. There is no one path through my installation work, and there is no one vantage point from which all can be seen clearly. Intricate hand cutting begins to look like life being eaten away. Rich, unusual embroidery begins to look like mycelial webs, reweaving. Botanical prints flourish in almost-domestic patterns: an invitation to come home to the vast, precarious, impossible complexity of this moment on earth. It asks: The land is changing; how are we going to change along with it?
Bio:
The cross-disciplinary work of Nicole Sara Simpkins combines printmaking, writing, and drawing to explore entanglements of culture, ecosystems, and personal healing. She holds an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University - Bloomington and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Macalester College. She has taught courses in Drawing and Printmaking at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Macalester College, University of Wisconsin—Stout, and Indiana University. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally. Her work has been supported by 2024 and 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a 2022 Mcknight Fellowship in Printmaking, a 2023 fellowship to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St. Andrews, Scotland, as well as by artist residencies and fellowships at Women’s Studio Workshop, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Millay Arts, Ucross, Jentel, Artspace Raleigh and The Vermont Studio Center. She lives in South Minneapolis and she really loves learning about plants.
CV:
EMAIL:
simpkins.nicole@gmail.com
INSTAGRAM:
books I'm influenced by/by theme:
Most beloved:
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2014. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN.
Simard, S. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2021.
Ting, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Complexifying the dominant paradigm on invasive species
Davis, Mark A. Invasion Biology. Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.
Dr. Daniel Simberloff, and Dr. Marcel Rejmanek. Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions. University of California Press, 2011.
Pearce, Fred, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation, 2015. Beacon Press: Boston, MA.
Scott, Timothy Lee, Invasive Plant Medicine: The Ecological Benefits and Healing Abilities of Invasives, 2010. Healing Arts Press.
Indigenous Epistemology and History
Treuer, David. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. Corsair, 2020.
Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
La, Cadena Marisol de, et al. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Duke University Press, 2015.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous People's History of the US, 2015. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Geniusz, Mary Siisip, Plants Have So Much To Give Us, All We Have To Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings, 2015. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN.
Animacy
Bennet, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2010. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, 2013. University of California Press, Oakland, CA.
Chen, Mel Y., Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 2012. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
Mycology
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2021.
Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. Penguin Books, 2019.
Intelligence & Memory (plant and human)
Mancuso, Stefano. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior. Atria Books, 2019.
O'Keane, Victoria. A Sense of Self: Memory, The Brain, and Who We Are. WW Norton, 2021.
Hallé, Francis. In Praise of Plants, Timber Press, Portland OR, 2002
The Anthropocene (or whatever)
Haraway, Donna J, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Davis, Heather and Turpin, Etienne, editors, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Critical Climate Change Series), 2015. Open Humanities Press.
Nature is Queer
Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 2006. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Erickson, Bruce, editors, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, 2010. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Political Imagining
brown, adrienne maree, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017. AK Press: Chico, CA.
bergman, carla and Montgomery, Nick, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, 2017. AK Press: Chico, CA.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark
Herbalism & Permaculture
Hemenway, Toby, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture (second edition), 2009. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT.
Other Non-fiction & Essayistic Work I Love
Biss, Eula. Having and Being Had, Riverhead Books, New York, NY, 2020
Biss, Eula. On Immunity: An Inoculation
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets
Carson, Ann, Glass, Irony, and God
Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby
Hong, Cathy Park, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2020