STATEMENT:
My work uses printmaking, writing, and drawing to explore entanglements of culture, ecosystems, and personal healing. So-called “invasive” plants are my central metaphor and my abiding curiosity. I carve botanically accurate linoleum prints of specific plant species: tansy and mullein, bittersweet and buckthorn. I combine these prints with salvaged textiles to construct large-scale installations of cut and stitched layers that invoke complex entanglements of resurgent plants and tumultuous extraction. With intricate hand-stitching, webbing, knotting and joining, I am engaged in a ritual of mending. In my research, I trace the historical context for this categorization of plant behavior, with its curious binarization of native vs invader. I take note of which plants are abundant across regions of the US and abroad, and I observe their growth patterns, the ecological conditions that they respond to, and the stories people tell about this.
Layers of materials and meaning permeate the work. For example, factories and oil refineries are populated with a repeating pattern from a historical family photo; it depicts my great-grandfather right before he left for World War I, where he died during the 1918 pandemic. Linoleum prints made in memoriam to the 2018 Robert’s Shoes fire have something new to say when stitched into the tapestries of 2023. Titles call forth my creative lineages to Eva Hesse, Anna Atkins, Katherine Ann Porter, and Ana Mendieta, and other artists and thinkers who made ground for me to work from.
Prints on paper in the Aftermath series portray transitional ecosystems through the cyanotype process combined with etching and ink drawing. With these “cameraless photographs,” I record the silhouettes of understory plants by placing them on paper coated with a light sensitive solution. I then print a copperplate etching onto translucent paper, which is fused to the cyanotype during the printing process. Finally, I carefully fill in the negative spaces by hand with a blue ink pen. The resulting images use light, water, ink, and fiber to make mysteriously beautiful layers while also telling a story about places undergoing change.
We’re encouraged to cultivate belligerence toward invasive plants, but their flourishing indicates complex constellations of interactions, and both plants and humans have always migrated and intermingled in response to changing conditions. As climate change alters ecosystems, the capacity to adapt and persist may be worth considering. I want to create conditions where we can bear to see the truth of how things are, and where vibrant new possibilities for repair and collaboration might become visible for the first time.
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 MCAD, Macalester, UW-Stout, and Indiana University. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally. Her work has been supported by a 2019 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a 2022 Mcknight Fellowship in Printmaking, and a 2023 fellowship to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St. Andrews, Scottland, as well as by artist residencies and fellowships at 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