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The past year of “L.A. Harvest” has engaged the varied relationships between artists and the land of Southern California. The natural spaces in which these artists spend time range widely in shape and scope— there are at least as many forms of gardens as there are neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
The final iteration of this project features artists who find healing and nourishment in nature and whose engagement with the land is rooted in the acknowledgment of the sustenance, relief, and care that plants have provided for millions of years. Their artistic practices actively exemplify this awareness. iris yirei hu is an avid hiker and uses rocks and plants discovered around L.A. to create pigments for her watercolors. Paige Emery explores healing through her communion with indoor and outdoor plants and botanicals, taking care to thank them one by one. Artist and educator Gerald Clarke stewards his family’s cattle ranch on the Cahuilla reservation in a role that has been passed down through his family for generations.
These artists provide an urgent model for how we might expand our sensitivity toward the natural world. They work alongside nature’s abundance, tending and transforming it. These symbiotic relationships run on careful observation of the present and a meaningful acknowledgment of the past, resulting in a practice of mutual caregiving that fosters both creativity and community.
iris yirei hu
iris yirei hu’s practice emphasizes nature’s bounty. She collects rocks during her hikes around Southern California, grinding them into powder pigments for watercolors that she stores in a paintbox or collected shells. Not all of hu’s pigments are light-fast, so some of her paintings change appearance over time—a characteristic she embraces. She finds the sacred in community and nature, and her explorations have led to connections with historians, tribal elders, water protectors, and scientists. She views her artistic practice as “a life practice of being mindful, aware, and open. It’s an ebb and flow between control and acceptance. It’s also one of transformation, from material to self to community.”
Paige Emery
Paige Emery’s relationship with plants necessitates reciprocity. An interdisciplinary artist, herbalist, and researcher of urban ecologies, Emery’s practice spans performance, sound, poetry, sculpture, and painting. When she spends time in her Echo Park container garden, Emery feels as if “time stands still and everything is going to be okay.” She formulates paints from dried flowers and plants: Guava leaves, sage, and passion flowers are infused in oils. Emery asks permission from each plant before using it and gives thanks before harvesting in the form of prayer, song, or water.
Gerald Clarke
An artist, educator, cultural practitioner, and member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, Gerald Clarke has tended to his family’s cattle ranch for much of his adult life, creating sustenance for the reservation’s greater community. Pigs, chickens, roosters, and goats roam the ranch, which sits on land that has been cared for by his ancestors for thousands of years. On the farm as well as in the studio, giving materials a second life is vital to Clarke—a sense of resourcefulness was instilled in him from a young age, and sustainability as a theme of his artwork was a natural result. When people ask him what medium he works in, he candidly replies, “kitchen sink.”
This essay was originally published in Carla issue 33.