A Kalamazoo woodcut printmaker and teacher is the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station Long-term Ecological Research program’s 2023 Artist-in-Residence.
Trevor Grabill from Flat Mountain Press arrived at KBS June 12 and will spend a week visiting labs and field sites and learning about research that’s underway at the Station.
Trevor Grabill
As a printmaker, Grabill takes inspiration from “strange and beautiful” glimpses of nature that can be found in the most unlikely places – parking lots, abandoned buildings, and other spaces we tend to pass by.
Grabill’s process of relief printmaking follows a method of creating hand-carved stamps of various sizes by first drawing images into a sketchbook and then tracing those images onto a wood block, which then is carved before filling the block with ink and putting it through a small press.
“I look for what’s happening there, the strange spaces of beauty that get reduced to a drive-by or passed-by space. Things that are not inevitable at all, but get reduced to the mundane,” Grabill said. “What I’m looking for when I’m at KBS is to similarly highlight how deeply strange and beautiful the spaces and organisms are that scientists are working with there.”
About the Artist-in-Residence program
Launched by Michigan State University in summer 2022 in an effort to promote art and science collaborations, the Farmscapes to Forests: Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research Artist-in-Residence Program is now in its second year.
Gretel Van Wieren, a professor of religious studies at MSU, spearheaded the artist-in-residence program in collaboration with KBS LTER Education and Outreach Coordinator Elizabeth Schultheis and KBS LTER Science Coordinator Nameer Baker. According to Van Wieren, the selection committee was impressed by Grabill’s interest in engaging the data of the researchers’ experiments to create a visual folk tale through art that communicates the underlying narrative of the research.
“Trevor had an interest not only in representing the natural habits and aesthetic aspects of KBS but also in really engaging some of the specific scientific experiments going on there,” Van Wieren said. “A unique aspect of Trevor’s art was welcoming the change to an informed approach — looking at, for instance, plants that thrive alongside agriculture, or the relationship between pollinators and a changing botanical world that KBS focuses on.”
Read Trevor’s series of updates on their residency here.
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W.K. Kellogg Biological Station welcomes 2023 artist-in-residence | June 15, 2023
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