There’s a sense, throughout culture, that the world is ending. In the September 5, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, for example, there is a “Talk of the Town” piece that describes a dj set by Chelsea Manning as “the world is burning down, so let’s party while we can.” And there’s a satire by Simon Rich about a future human who left earth because “the skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn’t walk across the street without collapsing.” Add to that shows like Station Eleven, post-apocalyptic novels like Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam and basically every Marvel movie, and you get the sense that human beings are soon to be extinct unless we find a savior, preferably a very butch man or woman who has an immediate solution for climate change.
Of course, there’s good reason to believe that humans might be in trouble. Thus far, 2022 has been one of the hottest years on record. This Labor Day weekend alone, there is expected to be record-breaking temperatures on the West coast and more rain in already-flooded Texas – not to mention three tropical storms developing in the Atlantic Ocean.
But what if we are anticipating the apocalypse not because of what nature is doing to us – but instead, because of what we’ve already done to our built environments. Where I live, in Savannah, Georgia, you only need to drive about ten blocks from my house to find miles and miles of strip malls dominated by concrete parking lots, corporate logos and sparse foliage, if there is any foliage at all. Travel just 10 miles west, to Pooler, and the landscape is dominated by highways punctuated by smoking fields razed for housing developments. Of course, Americans think that the apocalypse is nigh. We’ve obliterated natural environments to build habitats devoid of nature without thinking about what it would do to our psyches. The end times is not a heat event; it’s a Costco built next to a mansion next to a warehouse for Amazon.
You really feel this deeply walking through “Avant Gardener: A Creative Exploration of Imperiled Species,” an exhibition of new work by Lisa D. Watson on view at Sulfur Studios in Savannah through Saturday, October 22. Consisting of works in a variety of mediums including collage, painting, sculpture and installation, the show assembles what is best described as a “church of nature.” Rendered in exquisite detail – Watson worked for over fifteen years as a production designer in Hollywood – that artwork is dominated by depictions of native plant species that are endangered and rare due to human development.
Watson has always been an avid gardener. Raised outside of Pittsburgh, she spent most of her childhood afternoons playing in the wooded area behind her house. Her grandfather, Frank Barisano, an immigrant from Italy, was a lifelong gardener who planted 104 species of tomatoes every year, along with various other plants including a pear limb grafted onto a cherry tree. He passed his love of gardening (or maybe it was already in her blood) to Watson, who planted her own garden behind her home in Los Angeles. She used mostly species of flora native to the area. “It took me two years to establish the garden, but after that, I always had bees and butterflies,” she notes. In 2008, tired of the pace of life in Los Angeles, she moved to Savannah, where she established Plan It Green Design, a sustainable gardening business that she runs in tandem with her art practice. The two are intertwined. “It’s more rewarding for me if people plant a 6’x6’ native garden after seeing my show than it is for me to sell a painting,” she says.
The exhibition, in turn, is part art show, part teaching tool and part shrine. Watson’s subjects include the semaphore, a cactus that used to be found throughout Florida, but is now endangered due to habitat destruction and sea-level rise; the Coontie, a shrub that was harvested to the point of extinction, but was brought back to life by conservation efforts in the 1970s; and the Longleaf Pine Forest, a 4,500-acre preserve full of plants native to Georgia that is so threatened by poaching that its location is kept secret. (Watson received access through her work in the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance.)
The work in the show originated from paintings of bridges and highway structures that Watson began making in 2015. “Humans create all of these connections to get to places faster,” she says. “But what are we passing by?” She noticed that even in these barren landscapes, wildflowers and plants often grew; in fact, when she stopped to look at the flora, she often found endangered or rare species of plants. “I’m a ditch witch,” she laughs.
At first, she was intimidated by the thought of including plants and flowers in her artwork. ““Plants,” Watson says. “Are perfect.” She found access to their structures when she began cutting them out of materials such as cardboard. “I really started understanding plants’ shapes and structures and twists in this way,” she says. “It makes me a better gardener as well as a better painter.” Blossoms and leaves began to populate her paintings of desolate human structures including gas stations, parking lots and highways.
Watson, who works with reclaimed materials such as cardboard, broken cement and glitter, which she collects from thrift stores – “to seal it into an artwork so that it can’t go back into the environment,” she says – tries to stay as true to the original color of the plants and flowers she captures as possible. To do so, she uses acrylic paint from Starlandia, a reclaimed art supply store that sells discarded supplies from, among other artists, students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Although her conservation efforts are all encompassing, she doesn’t pontificate. There’s a sense, throughout the exhibition, that Watson is using sustainable materials, and creating artworks that draw attention to conservation matters because she has a passion for her subject. Her sense of obligation towards the natural world grew from love, and you feel that love in her artwork.
While some of the works are overtly hortative, such as a panel that shows, on one side, a barren concrete environment presided over by a construction worker holding a building plan, and on the other, a forest full of animals native to the Southeast presided over by a self-portrait of Watson, many are powerful in their persuasiveness. The exhibition opens with a large polyptych panel that shows various species that can be found in the Longleaf Pine Forest. Dense, otherworldly and gorgeous, the vast mixed media work has all of the painterly qualities of a work by Caspar David Friedrich, the only difference being that it’s painted on cardboard rather than canvas.
In the center of the main gallery sit two reclaimed church pews. They face a wall of small artworks that depict flowers and plants, and are connected by loops that mimic the quality of steel and concrete. Watson intends the installation to serve as a sort of altar; she hopes one day to install these works, and many more like them, in an actual abandoned church as a sort of altar to nature. Like so many artists, all she needs is the funding to make this dream a reality.
And what a dream it would be. To walk into an abandoned place of worship, and encounter a room full of love. Even in the midst of the smoking ruins of the apocalyptic landscapes that we’ve built for convenience, flowers still bloom. Or at least they do in Watson’s artwork.