Art in nature residency

story by KAREN LINDELL photos ALEXANDRA NICKLIN

Her Taft residency ends in May with the opening of an exhibition of her works, titled You Can Not Control What Is Wild, along with a fundraiser for the gardens. The exhibition will be open through June 30. Wheat describes the exhibition as “a conceptual flower shop, looking at everything that was removed from the garden while I was in residence there, and the things that aren’t there anymore. A lot of my work makes a trace of something. There’s an element of complete collapse in the paintings — like I’m controlling spaces and letting them go.”

For a series of art pieces in the exhibit titled “Outcasts,” for example, she “underpainted” with burnt bone char, then created the final pieces by burning and stenciling plants from the burn pile.

Humans: Meet Nature

The Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve, at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Lake Casitas, was founded in 1981 by businessman and developer John Taft when he donated the land to a nonprofit he created, the Conservation Endowment Fund. Curated gardens cover 15 acres; the remainder is protected open space. Areas in the cultivated portion include South African, Australian, aloe, agave cactus, and Zen gardens.

The site isn’t an easy place to find or drive to, located 2.5 miles up a road o Highway 150, west of Highway 33, that floods during rainy spurts. The Art in Nature Residency Program is a much newer creation, born from the confines of the Covid pandemic. Oak View digital-collage artist Cassandra C. Jones came up with the idea while under quarantine. In 2020, at home with her kids and musician husband who’s usually on the road, Jones was “going crazy doomscrolling,” she says. In search of a project that would allow her to get out of the house safely, she thought about Taft Gardens, which she had recently visited, and sent the garden’s coordinators an unsolicited artist residency proposal.

Jaide Whitman, CEO of Taft Gardens and John Taft’s granddaughter, thought it was a great idea, and agreed to renovate a studio on the grounds where Jones could work.

The residency, Whitman says, gives both artists and visitors an opportunity to experience the site as more than a traditional botanical garden. Most such gardens, Whitman says, “have a database of every single plant,” and mark, number, and date each specimen. “We don’t do that. The most important part of distinguishing who we are, and why John Taft created this place, is to have a relationship with yourself in nature.” The Art in Nature program is “a beautiful container for the community to interact with the land” without bringing in too many people at once.

Jones had an additional goal: to support and build up the art community in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties; resident artists must live in either county.

The first year, when Jones was the resident artist, the gardens hosted a free exhibition of her work along with a fundraising dinner party.

She’s now arts chair of the residency program, which has grown from one artist to eight. For 2022-23, the artists are Wheat, for a nine-month residency; performance artist Shana Moulton of Santa Barbara, for an invitational residency; clay artist P. Lyn Middleton, fiber artist Sally England, painter Richard Amend, and harpist-composer Shelley Burgon, all from Ojai, and painter Chris Ulivo of Ventura, for one-month residencies; and Rosemary Hall of Ojai, for a research residency.

Whitman says when she took over management duties at Taft several years ago, the gardens had been “on a really long hiatus,” focused on preservation e orts for about a decade without a lot of public events taking place. She wanted to return to the three-part mission statement her grandfather created in 1981: to “educate the public about (the gardens’) environmental heritage, preserve our endangered resources, and explore the relationship between humans and their environment.”

‘On the cusp’

As part of their residency, artists are expected to develop relationships with and interact with visitors, too. The main art studio, Jones says, “is like a fish tank, with glass windows all around, and people pop in and talk to the artists.”

Each artist responds di erently to the garden. When Jones was the resident artist, the subject matter for her digital art was “plastics in nature and how the natural world is absorbing the human role.”

In 2021-22, resident artist Stephanie Washburn focused on drawings of the ever-changing skies above the Ojai Valley; and co-artist Jane Mulfinger created landscape paintings layered with phrases related to climate change, such as “extreme turbulence” and “transpolar drift.”

Wheat says she’s fascinated by the location of the art studio at Taft: where the nature preserve meets the more curated gardens. “It’s really interesting to be in residence right on the cusp of those two possibilities,” she says. Many visitors seek out just the cultivated area, but Wheat has been impressed by visitors who are also interested in the nature preserve and “ecopsychology.”

While Jones was in residence, she gave tours of the gardens as she learned more about the plants that grow there, something she never could have done in a traditional art gallery. “The engagement was better than any engagement of anything in my 20-year career,” she says.

Botanical resistance

Wheat, in addition to the burn piles at Taft, is also interested in the concept of non-GMO herbicide-resistant plants. One of the works she created at Taft, titled “Resistance,” is a neon sculpture of hands holding Boliviana negra, a variant of the coca plant that is native to South America and used in sacred ceremonies and cocaine production.

Wheat came up with “Resistance” after listening to Colombian President Gustavo Petro give a 2022 speech to the United Nations “pleading for the U.S. to stop dropping (the herbicide) Roundup on the jungles there, and speaking to the coexistence of violence and beauty.”

As she considered her “conceptual flower shop” gallery of works at Taft, featuring traces of plants no longer living, she started looking at vintage flower-shop signs for inspiration and kept coming across the classic graphic of a hand holding a rose. She recalled reading about rose plantations in Ecuador “and how pesticides have devastated the environment there. But here in the U.S. we see this gorgeous, soft, beautiful-smelling cut flower that we give as a sign of adoration.”

She also learned that Boliviana negra was resistant to Roundup, which reminded her of the scores of trees that had to be cut down this year in Ojai’s Soule Park because they had been killed by pesticides.

The coca variant, she says, is “hiding in the jungle refusing to die, surviving against everything the colonial world can throw at it. No matter what side you are on, that is … poetic. Who doesn’t love the victorious underdog?”

The weeds, the outcasts, the underdogs, the burned … the resistance.

The 2023 Taft Art Residency Exhibition will be open to view during self-guided visiting hours by reservation at TaftGardens. org/visit through June 30. Twenty percent of the art sales are donated in support of the Taft Art in Nature Program. The 2023-24 residency application is open until July 15; applications accepted at TaftGardens.org/artist-inresidence.

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Wednesday thru Monday: 11am - 5pm. Closed Tuesday 805-646-9782 www.priscillainojai.com | facebook/priscillainojai | instagram:@priscillainojai and flourishing life you have under the soil, the more you’re going to have above.” — Connor Jones

LOOKING OUT ON A SUMMER DAY IN OJAI, IN THE HEAT, THE CLOUDLESS SKY, THE UNRELENTING SUN, ALL MAY SEEM �UIET — ONLY YOUR WIND CHIMES AND A HOBBLING BREEZE TO BREAK THE SILENCE. THE VALLEY’S MOUNTAINSIDES RISING UP TO CRADLE YOU BELOW, TOTALLY — SEEMINGLY — MOTIONLESS.

But in those still scapes, the mountains, the stretch of your yard, the garden beds, there is an abundance of happening; there are wars being waged, careful heists of priceless goods, miraculous and generational bonds of friendship, dynasties rising and falling at the hands of other dynasties. The slaughter of billions of beings at the hands of others. The giving of a billion life-granting gifts. All this churn of interacting life happening under the serene mirage of the soil’s surface.

We all know, as we bury our toes in the land, that miracles happen down there. We know from the treasured foods and alluring flowers and mystifying vegetative creations that burst forth from it. And yet, just as the miracle of life itself, it passes under our noses as wholly ordinary — banal even.

Nowadays, particularly in towns like Ojai, the zeitgeist is coming round on the moral imperative of soil. Glimmering words like “regenerative” and “steward” catch our eyes and ears like tithing opportunities for heaven. And truly, we are the better for it. But most have yet to come round on the majesty of soil. Most do not go sightseeing by hand through the soil the way they do by eye through the forest.

But, sprinkled through this valley like worms through the ground are Ojai’s soil obsessives. Soil is their play, their calling, and in some cases, their livelihood. They are oozing passion for this thing so brown and (seemingly) inanimate.

Passion for soil

At some point, they all caught the soil bug. For Connor Jones, founder of Ojai Permaculture and East End Eden, it was being “one of those kids who was in love with being covered in dirt and digging around,” then finding his way to the garden at 11. Camila Guzman, founder of Queen of Compost, also got hooked young, “playing in the mud, as a kid, doing mud baths with my cousins.” But for her it was really a moment of young-adult transformation that clinched it: “Something told me to just reach into the soil. So I started to almost massage the soil. And my arms were getting deeper. It felt like the Magic School Bus moment where I just felt like, wow, this soil is really pulling me in.” Guzman now spends much of her time facilitating those moments for others, “inviting them to get their hands dirty, because once they see the life that’s in the soil, it’s pretty mesmerizing.” She describes them “putting some gloves on, sticking their hand in some rich compost, and then pulling it out, trying to see worms wiggle and little tiny insects crawling around,” adding, “Usually people, even if they are a little squeamish at first, end up having this beautiful relation and compassion for these small critters that are working so hard beneath our feet.”

Creatures of soil

These small critters, these worms and tiny insects, are like the whales and large sharks of the soil. Beyond our eyes’ ability lie billions — no, gazillions! — more beasts. They are the many creatures that populate the ecosystem of the soil, and are every bit as essential to it as plants and animals are to