Laura Fantini

Laura Fantini’s hyper-realistic works inspire reconnection with nature through observation of the beauty and the astounding detail of the natural world. The artworks created for the Land Line residency were made using seedpods from Denver Botanic Gardens’ own living collections as reference. For Fantini, seeds are powerful symbols of optimism and the infinite possibility of new beginnings.

About the Artist

Laura Fantini is an artist working in a hyper-realistic minimalist manner, living and working in both Brooklyn, New York, and Bologna, Italy. She specializes in colored pencil still-life defined by strong contrast and dramatic lighting. She graduated from the Liceo Artistico and Academy of Fine Arts in her hometown of Bologna. Fantini's art has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries and art institutions and has been widely published and documented. She has won various awards, including The Canson Paper Award for Excellence and the Award for Exceptional Merit from the Colored Pencil Society of America. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh and at the Queens Botanical Garden in New York. 

T Edward Bak

During his Land Line residency, Bak created a series of illustrated works exploring the history of connections between people and native plants in the San Luis Valley region. His research drew from his own family history in the area, combined with resources offered by Denver Botanic Gardens. His work aims to support and expand awareness of connections between communities and their environments, and to detail the traditional knowledge and use of native plants in medicines and other cultural practices.

About the Artist

T Edward Bak was raised in Colorado and currently lives in Oregon. His approach as a writer and artist is informed by an interest in the environmental history of western North America. As an instructor of nonfiction comics and graphic novels with the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, he draws from the experience of a working cartoonist whose published stories have appeared in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase and The Best American Comics anthologies. 

Kyle Cornish

Kyle Cornish used the Land Line residency to collect visual source material from Denver Botanic Gardens’ modern and archival collections of specimens. Cornish’s perspective illuminates the role of race and identity in the experience of nature. The resulting collage artworks honor the Gardens’ mission to connect people with plants and celebrate abundance and community.

About the Artist

Kyle Cornish is a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores nature, Black identity and queer community in the Anthropocene.  

Joelle Cicak

Joelle Cicak used her Land Line residency to research the entanglements that occur within the steppe biomes represented at Denver Botanic Gardens. Exploring the delicate connections between plants and animals, Cicak’s work captures how these interactions build a foundation upon which we all may thrive. Her research at the Gardens aided the creation of ceramic sculpture displaying the interchange of life within ecosystems, celebrating the intricate interactions between different plant species and the ways in which they combine to wondrous ends.   

About the Artist

Joelle Cicak grew up against a stretch of forest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she learned at a young age the intricacies that exist between humans and the environment. Her undergraduate education at Dickinson College focused on art practices and classical studies. Because of this, she often uses mythology to aid her thoughts on nature, memory and the connection between past and present, personal and public. She received her MFA in ceramics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She focuses deeply on both her relationship with the natural world, as well as the cultural ideas that both bind us to and separate us from it. 

Lauren Camp

With an interest in ecology, Lauren Camp’s work focuses on the dangers plaguing the environment—shifting climate, increasing desertification and wildfires. During her Land Line residency, she searched for positive outcomes within our changing environment, looking at the plants most appropriate to our changing climate and ever-increasing aridity. The resulting poems reckon with the ways that nature recharges the land, and what has the courage to stretch and bloom. 

About the Artist

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently “Took House” (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Ecotone, Poet Lore and “Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology,” and her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic. She is a recipient of fellowships from Black Earth Institute and The Taft Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and North American Book Award. She lives in New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages.

Laleh Mehran and Christopher Coleman

Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman pursued a collaborative project for the Land Line residency, focusing on the natural world’s significance throughout history and across cultures. Their project resulted in a design inspired by carpets from Iran. The design combines plants from West Virginia (Coleman’s native home), Iran (Mehran’s native home) and Colorado (their current home), reflecting on the long history of migration of both people and plants. Combining old and new technologies, this work was created using 3-D recreations, photogrammetry, photography and lidar scanning, weaving a complex story of relationships and understanding.

About the Artists

Laleh Mehran was born in Iran and relocated to the U.S. at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. She creates elaborate environments in digital and physical spaces focused on complex intersections between politics, religion and science. Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and has exhibited across North America and countries including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, U.A.E., Bahrain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Taiwan and China. She is a professor and the director of emergent digital practices at the University of Denver. 

Chris Coleman was born in West Virginia and received his MFA from SUNY Buffalo in New York. His work includes creative coding, videos, sculptures and interactive installations. Coleman has exhibited in more than 20 countries including Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Finland, the U.A.E., Germany, France, China, Latvia and across North America. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado, and is a professor and the graduate director of emergent digital practices at the University of Denver. 

Sarojini Jha Johnson

Sarojini Jha Johnson’s work incorporates native and invasive flora and fauna to explore how human settlement and migration have impacted our natural landscape. For this residency, Jha Johnson created an artist book inspired by water lilies, an important symbol in South Asian iconography, and a recurring personal motif in her work. The Gardens’ waterways and the waterlilies in the Monet Pool became resources for this endeavor, culminating in a hand-bound book of intaglio prints housed in a custom-designed box. 

About the Artist

Sarojini Jha Johnson grew up in Ohio and earned undergraduate degrees in French and drawing from the University of Cincinnati. She received an MFA in printmaking from Miami University where she began working with animal and plant forms in her prints. She teaches printmaking at Ball State University in Indiana. Johnson’s main medium is color intaglio printmaking, a medium that allows for great creativity and invention in terms of surface and color. Recently, she has been exploring memories and impressions of India, her country of origin, while retaining her usual animal and plant imagery. She also makes books that highlight the devastating effects of humankind’s tampering with nature by introducing invasive flora and fauna. 

Amy K. Wendland

Amy K. Wendland uses a combination of humor and unusual materials to tell stories about our relationship with the environment. During her residency at Denver Botanic Gardens, she will work with deaccessioned herbarium sheets, transforming them into modern "herbaria viva"—dried plant specimens augmented with drawing or painting to tell the story of the plant and its landscape. Wendland seeks to fuse creative symbolism with scientific knowledge to explore the varied ways we relate to the natural world. 

About the Artist 

Amy K. Wendland lives and works in Durango, Colorado, where she serves as a professor in the Art & Design Department and as Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences at Fort Lewis College. She received her BFA in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MA with a sculpture concentration and an MFA in graphics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has worked commercially as an artist and designer, and her drawings, sculptures and mixed media works have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Irina Neacșu

Irina Neacșu focuses on endemic wild flora and is interested in research projects that raise awareness of natural habitats. During her residency at Denver Botanic Gardens, she created a body of botanical illustrations exploring her fascination with endemic flora, inspiring appreciation for the wild plant life surrounding us. 

About the Artist 

Irina Neacșu is a graduate from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania, and a postgraduate from the Rome University of Fine Arts. She runs a private art school in Transylvania, Romania. She was awarded an art residency at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and has exhibited at the Royal Horticultural Society Botanical Art and Photography Show in London. Her focus is on endemic wild flora and she is particularly interested in research projects that raise awareness of natural habitats. 

Jasmine Holmes

Jasmine Holmes uses depictions of staple food crops from her Creole upbringing to explore connections to her West African ancestry. She considers her work a love letter to her ancestors and their cultivation of the land, depicting and celebrating the knowledge and food traditions that have been passed down within her family for generations. Holmes used her Land Line residency to create paintings that explore the beauty of the botanical world and honor the sustenance it offers.  

About the Artist 

Jasmine Holmes is a mixed media artist living and working in Colorado. Born in Arizona, she received her BFA from the University of West Florida, and her MFA from Colorado State University. She has exhibited with Redline, IRL Art Gallery and has presented as a demonstrating artist at the Denver Art Museum. 

Eloisa Guanlao

Eloisa Guanlao’s versatile art practice explores nature’s complex relationship with humans. For the Land Line residency, Guanlao created works including a sewn replica of a woodpecker that kept her company at the Plains Conservation Center (PCC), and infrared photographs taken at Chatfield Farms and the PCC. These photographs are part of Guanlao’s Hearth Series, capturing places that contain resources for survival and represent hearth and home to the organisms that inhabit that area. 

About the Artist
 
Born in the Philippines, Eloisa Guanlao’s experiences as an immigrant and nomadic scholar-artist influence her versatile art practice and critical inquiries. With an interest in the natural world, history, art, languages and literature, she considers art making a social and cultural endeavor and pursues projects that are research intensive and relevant to current issues. Eloisa Guanlao attended the Los Angeles High School for the Arts, Carleton College in Minnesota, and received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. Guanlao practices and teaches art in California.

Jessi Harvey

Jessi Harvey inspires curiosity about nature through music incorporating humor, surprise and variation. The curiosity and joy expressed through their music offers listeners the opportunity to listen closely to the natural world around them. Their time at Denver Botanic Gardens was used to create Shades of Colorado, a string quartet that explores the lifecycles of local flora and natural phenomena in Colorado.  

About the Artist 

Jessi Harvey is a Montana-born composer and teacher. Their works are based in nature, social curiosity and humor. Harvey’s work "by the nature of our conversation" won first place at the 2020 Darkwater Womxn in Music Festival. They have worked with several music organizations including, Opera Elect, the Art Song Collaborative Project, and the performance group Strange Interlude. Their work has been featured nationally and they were a selected composer at Unheard-of//Ensemble’s Collaborative Composition Initiative and held a position as a resident artist at the Rensing Center, South Carolina.