LISSA MATTHIAS: FIELD MARKS - INTRODUCTION

The exhibition titled Field Marks was created by artist Lisa Matthias, an interdisciplinary artist based in Edmonton. While her primary focus is on printmaking, she also incorporates photography, drawing, and animation into her practice. Matthias’ work revolves around ecological issues, and she derives her imagery from direct observation and the study of nature in various locations.

Within her field of study, Matthias specializes in large-format woodcuts, a material-oriented process that allows her to experiment with different tools and techniques. Although most of her artwork is representational, some pieces exhibit an abstract quality. This abstraction stems from her observations of plant forms under the microscope. By magnifying these structures, Matthias captures microscopic shapes and incorporates them into her large-format prints. Additionally, her intuitive and experimental artistic approach contributes to the abstract appearance of the forms and compositions.

While the subject matter of Matthias’ exhibition encompasses a range of imagery, including microscopic views of various plant matter, the dominant feature in most of her prints are images of birds’ nests. Her interest in ornithology, derived from her degrees in Botany and Biological Sciences, has led her to study birds as an avid birdwatcher. She observes the seasonal migratory patterns of certain species as well as the year-round residents in her area. The images of birds’ nests in her artwork are based on photographs she took at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton.

Field Marks is an exhibition that combines art and ecology. The selection of prints includes both representational images and abstract structures based on magnified plant forms. The abstract images, while derived from microscopic observations, still maintain a connection to observable reality. The cohesive element of the exhibition lies in Matthias’ artistic style, characterized by dense mark-making and strong contrast between negative and positive spaces. Field Marks serves as a poetic and critical intersection of scientific inquiry, artistic interpretation, and expressive mark-making.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery

THE BRIDGE: SYNERGY BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

By: Agnieszka Matejko

Even on the most frightful, bone-chilling days when aspen trees’ bare branches are silhouetted against windswept skies and snow crunches underfoot, Lisa Matthias ventures out into the bleak prairie landscape. Not a day passes without her spending time outdoors. The six acres of land on her property, located an hour west of Edmonton, provide endless inspiration.

As a wildlife biologist with two science degrees under her belt, Matthias has a deep connection to the land and sees nature with astonishing acuity. She detects bird migration patterns, understands invasive plants at the microscopic level, and recognizes the dismal environmental footprint of our Anthropocene epoch. Since becoming a full-time artist in 2013, she has transformed her knowledge into penetrating and otherworldly nature-based woodprints.

Her shift from a scientific to a creative worldview didn’t come as an epiphany: she has always been an artist. “It’s like a fire that never stops burning for creative types. You have to keep making things,” says Matthias. She even found time to take printmaking classes while working towards her Master of Science degree in plant ecology at the University of Manitoba.

Matthias cherished her subsequent environmental and conservation work with Alberta’s Fish and Wildlife Department, but art continued to tug at her heartstrings. In 2010, having accumulated enough studio and art-history courses, she applied to the University of Alberta’s renowned printmaking program.

At first, Matthias didn’t want to be seen as a scientist who happened to be an art student. But gradually she recognized the creative potential of her background. She could achieve what few artists could: draw unique insights from interdisciplinary ecology, science and art.

Not long after graduating, Matthias began working on large-scale woodblock prints that immerse the viewer in stark and mysterious landscapes. Some of her gestural strokes, laboriously carved into birch and maple plywood and printed onto plant-fibre paper, are easily identifiable as leaves, branches, bird nests and plants. Others allow viewers to gaze into the unrecognizable and hidden inner workings of mosses, butterfly wings and microscopic algae.

Matthias sources the most enigmatic images through collaborations with scientific colleagues, but she finds many on the land right outside her door. That’s exactly what happened when she spotted one of her favourite wildflowers, orange hawkweed, growing along her property’s ditches. She said to her kids, “It’s listed as a noxious weed by the county, so if you have it you are supposed to get rid of it.” And she promptly sent them out to collect whole armloads of the flowers.

Instead of tossing the radiantly coloured bouquets, she displayed them in jars around her house. But Matthias wasn’t satisfied with superficial beauty: she wanted to see right inside. She placed the hawkweed under a dissecting and light microscope. These photographs of the magnified segments, such as the sensuous fiddlehead curls of the stigma, inspired her 10’ long print, The Meadow.

This ode to an unwanted flower – or “a landscape from an ant’s perspective” as she calls it – invites viewers to look deeply at the ecosystems we bypass daily. What is a weed? Where does it come from? How does it alter the landscape? Matthias’ own answers to these questions are insightful and surprising.

As an ecologist, she knows that invasive species can have disastrous consequences. But she doesn’t believe we have to paint everything with the same brush. “There are a lot of species that came from a different place in the world that are doing just fine here,” she says. Plants have moved around the world for millennia. To her, words like invasive and alien that describe migrants – whether plants or people – are needlessly accusatory and warlike. “We may need to manage species like orange hawkweed in places,” she adds. “But the problem starts with how we alter the landscape.”

By a fortuitous accident, as she gazed at her microscopic hawkweed, some tiny stray leaves fell onto her slides. Matthias was overwhelmed by these beautiful images, and she created the Sphagnum Moss Microscopy series in honour of the minute intruder.

Her fascination wasn’t just aesthetic. As Matthias researched the sphagnum moss leaf, she discovered its enormous ecological consequences. “These ancient plants are potentially one of the greatest sources of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere,” she says. Tragically, they thrive in areas where oil and gas extraction destroys entire landscapes. While vulnerable to industry, Sphagnum mosses are also astonishingly resilient. They can be desiccated for long periods of time but the unique architecture of their water-retaining hyaline cells allows them to regenerate.

Matthias’ wonder at these cells’ nearly miraculous properties is palpable. In works, such as

Sphagnum Moss Microscopy IV, her hyaline cells are exuberant, alive and thriving. Their tangled masses, enlarged to over 400 times their actual size, spin like whirling dervishes. Their timeless dance helps our planet survive.

Matthias’ latest print series zooms out of the microcosm and offers viewers a close look at nests. This time, viewers aren’t invited to peek into their inner workings, but encounter nests that seem almost large enough to curl up in.

As nest-collecting is prohibited, Matthias didn’t collect samples. Instead, she visited the Royal Alberta Museum’s ornithology department and based her work on over 600 photographs of these architectural masterpieces. “They are such amazingly intricate objects,” she says as she looks at the yellow warbler nest depicted in one of her prints.

Nest-building behaviour is hidden and secretive, so even avid birders like Matthias rarely observe it. But if she comes across a nest on her daily walks, it usually belongs to the yellow warbler – a bird with extraordinary skills at recognizing parasite species. “When they see a cowbird egg in their nest, they will just build another nest on top of the first one,” she says. “One nest I saw in the museum had three nests stacked on top of each other.”

Another nest featured in this series belongs to a blue jay – a colourful and intelligent species that takes advantage of the garbage humans leave behind. At 4’ x 3’, Matthias’ Blue Jay Nest gives viewers a close peek at the strange assortment of treasures these birds collected. A plastic tie stands out in the foreground, but some objects, like the shiny silver ribbon, straw wrapper, nylon twine and lined notepaper that Matthias observed in the actual nest, can barely be discerned amidst the tangle of twigs.

The most recent 15’ print in this series, The Ornithology Collection, is Matthias’ largest work to date. It’s long enough to feel like a nature walk in the prairie landscape. But the same can be said for the artist’s entire body of work. In a gallery setting, individual prints form continuous scrolls or movie stills that take viewers on a guided tour of wildlife’s mysteries.

Yet her art is far more than an ecology lesson. Matthias’ bold and expressive printing style exposes each slash of her chisel. Her gestures evoke the raw emotion of the Die Brücke group of German artists who popularized her favourite medium, woodblock printing, at the turn of the 19th century. They founded German Expressionism – a movement Matthias greatly admires.

Die Brücke, whose name means “the bridge” in German, revered progress and eschewed older modes of artistic expression. The bridge metaphor equally describes Matthias’ art: it links the past and the present, blends objective science with subjective expression and portends a better future.

At this pivotal time in history, as scientists warn about greenhouse gases’ dire consequences, Matthias’ prints call for more reverential ways of living. They point to an exhilarating new world where an unwanted weed that blooms along roadside ditches, a nest tossed by a strong breeze, or even a tiny patch of moss underfoot is noticed, considered and valued.

AGNIESZKA MATEJKO: BIO

Agnieszka Matejko is a freelance writer and community-based artist whose practice focuses on youth and children as well as engaging non-arts groups in public art projects. Her installations include Word on the Street, where poetry by inner-city residents was sandblasted onto sidewalks in Edmonton’s McCauley neighbourhood. She regularly writes for Galleries West, among others.

Artist Statement For Field Marks Exhibition

As an interdisciplinary artist and ecologist I’m interested in the patterns and processes of natural history. E.O. Wilson has defined nature as “all existence that lies beyond human control.”1 Humans have an innate tendency to show interest in other forms of life; we may be predisposed to focus on living things as opposed to the inanimate.2 My creative research uses the same starting point as the scientific method: making observations and asking questions. I document and study nature and the environment through field sound recordings, collecting specimens, collaborating with other scientists, photography, drawing, animation, writing, and printmaking.

Printmaking is a field of study that I’ve been focused on for 15 years. Within the visual arts it is unique in its diverse technical procedures, its aesthetic qualities, and the possibilities it presents for experimentation. My practice has focused on large-format woodcut. Also known as relief printmaking, the methodology involves carefully carving away the surface of a sheet of plywood to create an image, applying ink to the raised surface that remains, and laying paper on top to transfer the image. I’m drawn to the sculptural quality of the woodblock; the materiality of the wood, paper, and ink; and the layers of technique and skill involved. The final relief print on paper, its image reversed from that on the surface of the carved woodblock, is a manifestation of numerous processes that have unfolded.

The abstraction in some of my prints is in part a result of the groundwork I undertake for a project. I often find myself using microscopic imagery, which is alien-looking to begin with, then enlarged by several orders of magnitude in creating artworks. I spent many years studying botany, which regularly involved microscopy, and I sometimes return to that familiar scientific tactic for creative inquiries. Abstraction can also be an intuitive approach for me in working through ideas and compositions.

I’ve been a birdwatcher for over two decades, and there is always something new to learn and observe about birds in their habitats. There are seasonal shifts in the community of birds in any given place in Canada, as most bird species migrate to and from their breeding and overwintering grounds each year. Many of us feel a deep connection to these events, whether it’s the longawaited sounds of early spring passing overhead (I eagerly listen for the distant rattling calls of sandhill cranes migrating each year, so high above on the rising thermal winds that you can barely see them) and the arrival of summer residents (the jubilant song of the rose-breasted grosbeak); or the winter descent of more northern species that descend on a given region for the winter; or the steady presence of year-long residents like black-capped chickadees during our coldest winter deep freezes.

These bird nest prints began by studying local natural history specimens. My fascination with these objects started with examining old decomposing nests of American robins, blue jays, yellow warblers, chipping sparrows, red-eyed vireos, and more. Bird nests are intricately built with a variety of materials, in some cases including human artefacts like ribbon, organic and synthetic twine and string, zip-ties, twist ties, wire, plastic, straws, and paper (I found all of these in a single blue jay nest in central Edmonton). Sometimes these human remnants are used as decorative elements, loosely woven around the outer edges of nests; sometimes as structural components. In September 2022 I visited the ornithology collection of the Royal Alberta Museum, and with the help of the Curator of Ornithology I examined and photo-documented their collection of songbird nests. One of the Baltimore oriole nests in the collection was made entirely of fishing line and hooks – not normally a safe material for wildlife to encounter, but somehow expertly wielded by a female oriole to weave her pendant sock-like nest. I took hundreds of photographs of the collection to reference in my artwork. The Ornithology Collection, a 15-foot-long woodcut print, is my most ambitious work to date. My research for this project continued in June 2023 when I was Artist-in-Residence at Point Pelee National Park, Ontario. This southernmost mainland tip of the country that protrudes out from the north shore of Lake Erie is on a major bird migration route. The north shores of Lake Erie attract a wide diversity of birds that land there after crossing the lake each spring. A field mark refers to the distinctive dots, stripes, patterns, and colours that vary widely across bird species, used by birds and birdwatchers alike to recognize individual species.

In 2022 I made a body of woodcuts that examined Sphagnum mosses, an ecologically important group of plants that create peatlands. Also known as peat moss, these plants decompose slowly, accruing massive reserves of undecomposed biological matter over millennia. Peatlands sequester even more atmospheric carbon than do forests, and so these tiny plants could play a major role in helping to mitigate human-caused climate change. They also have unique botanical structures. I carved an 8-foot long piece as the first in this series, followed by several square-format pieces, all of which focus on the anatomy of Sphagnum leaves and their prominent hyaline (water-holding) cells from several common species in northern Alberta. The samples I looked at were collected by a bryologist (a scientist who studies mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) with whom I was collaborating.

In an ongoing collaboration with a phycologist (a scientist who studies algae), I created a 2021 series inspired by a diverse group of protists called diatoms. I worked with diatoms and algae on the west coast of British Columbia over 20 years ago in my first job as a biologist. Diatoms are single-celled photosynthesizing organisms that are covered in intricately patterned glass cell walls called frustules. They’re responsible for producing a significant proportion of Earth’s oxygen, and there are thousands of different species. This series of woodcuts looks at the diversity of diatoms found in samples I collected and images from my collaborator. These pieces remind me of towering cityscapes and human architecture, though they’re from drawings of organisms whose actual size is a few thousandths of a millimetre.

In 2020 I completed a series of oversized woodcut prints during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. The Meadow, a 10-foot long print, and the body of work that I completed along with it, takes most of its visual inspiration from the “weeds” growing around my yard, since I was spending most of my time at home. Orange hawkweed is one of my favourite wildflowers: its petals range from dark red-orange to beeswax yellow, and it has the distinct floral morphology of a member of the aster family. Similar to a dandelion, each flower head of orange hawkweed is actually an inflorescence made up of numerous miniature flowers crowded together. The Meadow is an enormous interpretation of one of the many compositions of squashed flower parts that I made on microscope slides as I examined these flowers. This work is partly an ode to this somewhat maligned (for being a noxious weed) flower, and the pertinacity and wildness of plants.

The prints selected for this exhibition express multiple ambiguities: they are abstract but also referential, energetic and composed, sometimes graphic and flat and sometimes dimensional and sculptural. The considerable size of these works on paper and the density of mark-making immerses viewers in images of biological configurations and perplexing architectural views. I believe that visual art has the potential to help bring about change in the face of today’s environmental crises, and I hope that my artwork reflects how the interdisciplinarity of contemporary art and ecology can offer a unique visual perspective.

Lisa Matthias

Endnotes

1 Wilson, E. O. 2020. Tales from the Ant World. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York.

2 Wilson, E. O. 2002. The Future of Life. Vintage Books. New York.

LISA MATTHIAS: BIO

Lisa Matthias is an artist, art educator, and ecologist, living in Parkland County, Alberta, Canada. She has Master of Fine Arts in printmaking (University of Alberta), a Master of Science in plant ecology (University of Manitoba), and a Bachelor of Science in biology (University of Guelph). Her artwork is inspired by being immersed in nature and learning about the natural world. After working for over a decade as a botanist and wildlife biologist in western Canada, she switched career paths to pursue the visual arts full-time. She often uses science-based processes like microscopy, field sound recording, and collaborations with scientific colleagues, in her creative research. Lisa’s studio practice centers around printmaking, with a focus on large-scale woodcut. Recent projects have focused on local songbirds (the materiality of nest-building, annual migration behaviours), Sphagnum mosses (their diversity and potential role in climate change mitigation), diatoms (collaborating with a phycologist and freshwater limnologist), and roadside weeds (an ode to orange hawkweed, one of Lisa’s favourite wildflowers, also considered by some to be a noxious weed). Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and internationally.