Mara Adamitz Scrupe

USA

My art practice crosses the boundaries between science, art and technology in efforts to address real life ideas and issues. The Fota Lichens Project is propelled by botanical studies I’ve conducted for the past fifteen years on my farm in Virginia. In my art practice, I partner proactive environmental strategies with visual and sensory schemes that endeavour to engage audiences with the elegance, power, beauty and efficiency of natural systems.

Because lichens are effective and reliable bio-indicators, environmental scientists have undertaken lichen studies as a means of determining the relative health of ecosystems. In the past couple of decades, Ireland has begun to deal with certain formerly unknown forms of environmental and ecological decline resulting from its well-documented growth and development. Ireland is also the natural home of a huge diversity of lichen species (some of them rare endemic species).

The Fota Lichens Project represents an effort to conduct a natural science and art-based survey of Irish lichens – not a scientific study, but rather a broad overview. The project gives a rough idea of the relative environmental health of the air and water in the districts where the specimens were photographed and collected – especially when compared with studies conducted in these regions some years ago. The Fota Lichens Project also shares the visual and tactile appeal of these seemingly modest but extraordinarily beautiful and remarkable organisms with a range of audiences (art viewers, gardeners, naturalists, environmentalists, among others), and asserts the powerful associations between art and science while sharing in the continuum of efforts by artists in Ireland and elsewhere in making evocative and meaningful art works from and about nature.

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)