Lakeside Lab Report Artist-in-Residence July 1 – July 12, 2024 Kristin M Roach 12 days One cannot speak of Iowa Lakeside Lab without mentioning the incredible community housed there. The residency was a wonderful experience in itself—12 days in the studio, untethered from daily responsibilities, surrounded by nature, with a dedicated workspace and meals …
What’s the sound of temperature? How about humidity, radiation, and pressure, among the many ecological forces we experience but don’t hear? I considered questions like these as I collected environmental data using a device called the Arable Mark, which monitors weather, plants, soil, and irrigation, and created a set of five linked installations at Lakeside …
We started Parts Per Million Collective to change our understanding of art and art making. We feel art can and should begin to take a more active role in the climate crisis. To us, this means creating works to directly benefit the environment. Our pathway to this goal is through research, testing, and merging carbon …
I love experiments and surprises and thrive on these in my artistic practice. I use unframed raw canvas, taffeta, and satin to create large mixed media landscapes. I layer highly-pigmented color “soups” on the fabric and trace cast shadows from my immediate natural and built environment. Back in the studio, I dress these figures in …
As a true Gemini, I’ve had quite a few occupations. I’ve been an ice cream store clerk, business operations manager, entrepreneur, HR specialist, advertising guru, administrative assistant, housekeeper, social worker, post-secondary student, instructor, professor, mother, and life partner. And yes, I’ve been an artist. Being an artist and creator has been my one constant …
There’s value in Science. As humans, we are well-practiced in gathering data and putting it into categories, to make sense of a world we are merely getting to know. Science helped us moving “forward” as a species, creating technology that makes my artist brain spin by only thinking about it. Science is awesome. What fuels …
Imagine Iowa Great Lakes and the Iowa Lakeside Lab hosted a series of public events produced as a result of the inaugural Public Art and Ecology Residency. For the 2021 Summer, the artist collective Space Saloon spent three months in Northwest Iowa, observing the region’s landscapes and diverse ecosystems. Their reactions and results were on …
Scientists and artists practice imagining better, more meaningful, more integrated futures. There are many forces that threaten this practice: existentialism; injustice; denial; scarcity. These threatening forces can be investigated in balance with the practice of imagination when the art-science partnership is most effective. At Lakeside Lab, artists connect with scientists in effective partnerships that support …
This experience inspired me! I will be forever grateful for the two weeks I spent making and being outdoors at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. I wish I was there at a different time since the pandemic made it a little hard to socialize the way I would have liked to, but I’m still grateful for …
Hello again, Iowa … … it’s been a minute! Although I now reside in the Twin Cities, I spent most of my life (outdoors!) in Iowa. I grew up in eastern Iowa, spending most summers floating the Maquoketa River, feeding ducks at Iowa City’s city park, and running to and around Pictured Rocks State Park. …
“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.” — Charles Darwin During my two-week residency at the Lakeside Lab AIR, I made a series of creative projects inspired by site-specific findings. Located alongside West Okoboji …
6/18 On Monday morning, with the animal behavior class, we released some sunfish, pike, bass and minnows that we had gathered for predator/prey experiments. It was a rainy morning, so we went to a coffee shop to talk about parenting behavior. During the discussion, Neil got a phone call from Dwight who restores natural prairies …
Read more “It is Important to be Fascinated by the Little Things”
Monday Hannah and Richelle and I go out with Neil’s class and collect samples of smaller organisms in the muck in one of the locations around the west side of the lake. I decided late last week that I wanted to make sure I saw as much as I could around the lake and soak …
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ― Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder How often do you spend time in nature? Do you connect with nature daily? Do you listen for bird calls or get up close to a spider’s web …
Read more “Artist and scientists must inspire others to see like them.”
6/10 I began my drive to Iowa from Kalamazoo, Michigan on June 10th. It was my first trip into the state, and I really had no ideas of what Iowa or its landscape would be like. I was not altogether surprised that it was flat, but had not considered the vastness of the landscape before …
Read more “Mucky Areas, Animal Behavior, and the Value of Observation”
Week 2 – No comfort in a growth zone, no growth in a comfort zone The good news — no poison ivy yet! Sunday There was a lovely parents brunch today. Lisa Roti did a beautiful job decorating the room and Erika created a buffet that was really lovely. I’d like to add that the …
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For more than 5,000 years, tallgrass prairies occupied 240 million acres of North America’s landscape, about 85% of the Midwest. All of this changed in the 1800s with European settlement. Settlers arrived with the goal of “breaking the land,” to replace the rolling prairies with productive farmland. They succeeded, and today, from region to region, …
Week 1 – Becoming Intimate With fear Face toward your fear, leap into your fear, and . . . smile at fear. But the main teaching is that you actually can stay with it, you actually can turn towards it, you actually can leap into it rather than having it set off this chain reaction. …
Brian Schorn’s exhibition titled “Practice, Rhythm and Ritual: Meditative Minimalism” at Crooked Tree Arts Center in Traverse City, MI featured 24 new works created by him, many of which were developed during his time as an Artist-in-Residence at Lakeside Lab. You can read more about the work Brian made at the Lab in his artist …
Being deeply immersed in the web of nature’s way over the last four weeks has been an enlightening experience. The opportunity to work with and learn from the scientists at Iowa Lakeside Lab has added another educational dimension to this experience for which I am grateful. Through self-reflection, contemplation, direct observation, identification guides, classroom participation, …
Read more “Indra’s Net: Interconnectedness and the Ecology of Okoboji”
Week 1 (June 9th-16th, 2017) My first week here at Lakeside Lab has been full of all types of exploring. From exploring the grounds where Lakeside Lab is located, the collections in the many labs, and the lands that surround West Lake Okoboji. I arrived during the evening of June 9th, where I briefly walked …
Read more “Exploring the Grounds, the Collections, and the Land”
What a mess and a blessing, to be back on the lake, expected to present a studio full of made objects for the benefit of expanding the students’ horizons. I am examining my anxiety levels with interest and frantically pasting tissue paper to sticks. I’ve become known for being a person who carries sticks around …
Read more “A Mess, a Blessing, a Giant Screen, and a lot of Sticks”
During my second week at Lakeside, I spent a lot of time exploring specimen collections here and made some drawings based on my findings. In King Lab I found drawers of taxidermy birds, a cabinet housing an entomology collection, and a variety of plant specimens dried and labeled in clear boxes. I’m curious about collection …
Week two… where has the time gone. The past few days have been full of exploration including a field study on soil, sound recording above and below the water line, creating sound maps, creating light maps, exploring data gathered both digitally and through scientific testing, and a mild first of the year sun burn. In …
WEEK 1 Report: Reigniting the Wonder Lamp of the Natural World Upon arrival, I explored all of the labs and hiked the trails on the property to get a sense of where I would be living and working for the next month. Immediately, I developed a sense of place that felt like home. Home, in …
I loved sharing the studio with other artists. I ran around this week scanning the environment and experimenting with sound visualization.
Do you like kayaking, microscopes, great conversation, science, and food? Well, you would fit in great at Lakeside Lab. Week one of the Lakeside Lab Artist in Residency has been full of discussion, inquiry, learning, and exploration of the environment and topics relevant not only to ecology and science but art and design as well. …
Read more “Scientific data, ethics, personal awareness, & environmental impacts”
As an artist whose work is primarily inspired by the natural world, but whose understanding of ecology is more experiential than academic or scientific, the opportunity to sit in on classes at Lakeside Laboratory has been an invaluable experience. I’ve lived in the Midwest for less than a year, so I came into this residency …
Read more “At Lakeside, everyday conversations are peppered with impromptu lessons”