“Seeing Green: A Close Look” by Lyn Baldwin & Ila Crawford in the KAC Main Gallery

23 July 2022 10:00 am

“Seeing Green: A Close Look” by Lyn Baldwin & Ila Crawford in the KAC Main Gallery

Seeing Green: It’s More than Dandelion

Friday, July 8th, 2022 – Saturday, July 23rd, 2022

Mediums: Watercolor, Acrylic, Anthotype, Cyanotype, Laser engraving, Printmaking

Artist Statement:

Exotic or common, invasive or naturalized—all plants tell multiple stories if we pay attention. Omnipresent, yet often overlooked, their quiet bodies clothe our land, build our houses, fill our refrigerators and embellish everything sacred and profane. Yet, too often, we overlook their gifts with little understanding of the individual lives who give so much—those quiet and slow-moving beings who drink starlight, share along fungal networks of need, gossip without voice and stand without muscle or bone. Too often, we fill our homes and gardens with species historically ‘exotic’ to our ecosystems even as we ignore those long in place.

Seeing Green is an exhibit that started out focusing on exotic plants. By definition, exotic plants are not indigenous to their locale but have arrived from elsewhere, most often with help from other travellers. But then we discovered that many plants, indigenous or naturalized to our ecosystem, have been made exotic through our cultural understandings of desirable and undesirable plants. Running through much botany is the quest for spectacle—the pink dandelion, the double rose, the four-leaf clover. Incorporating diverse approaches—science and art, pencil and photograph, image and word—the work in this exhibit aims to celebrate the diversity of the botanical world and to pay attention to how we get along with plants. Plants can be hard to know well but, in today’s climate crisis, cultivating a new understanding of them as our most important allies is a critical step in creating a liveable future.

Artist Bio:

Organized by Lyn Baldwin and Ila Crawford, this exhibit includes the work of several regional artists. Ila Crawford is Educator Emerita, Visual Arts, TRU, and Lyn Baldwin is a Professor, Biological Sciences, TRU. This exhibit is an ongoing project in Ila and Lyn’s collaboration on plants, people and place.

Biographies of individual artists will be available at the exhibit.

Lyn and Ila’s show will be exhibited in the main gallery from July 8 to July 23, 2022.

View their upcoming show in our online gallery here!