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- Artist Name:
- Rebecca Potts
- Location:
- Montana
- Statement:
- My impetus is ecological concern and interest in human interaction with land. This interaction is two-sided: we both alter and are altered by the land. As places change, our memories waver and shift, leaving only traces of lost environments. Just as memory builds in layers, I work in layers, physically and metaphorically. Geologic strata and layers of human anatomy help me envision the planet as organism. Computer mapping systems (GIS) use layers of information to create complex interactive map images, while I compile information that burrows into my work. I build images through accumulation of materials including paper, photographs, maps, melting ice, and growing plants. Paper stacks up to become sculptural, photographs form videos, ice leaves waterlines, as if flood and drought had their way with the work. <br><br>
While I often employ my experience in painting and printmaking, my ideas take precedence in informing my process and media. This makes my practice non-media-specific crossing into sculpture, video, and installation. I put much of my work through a cyclic process of which I am not the only part. I turn the work over to ice, plants, water, or other natural processes to remove my hand and forfeit some control. This process speaks to natural cycles of seasons and tides, while also reflecting the dynamic interaction of human and natural forces in the world. <br><br>
During the past two years, I have focused on water's role in climate change: melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and the quickening loss of this blue-gold. My current work uses beauty, poetics, humor, and narrative to explore this issue. The work takes the form of ice ? as sculpture, printmaking ink, and documented in photo and video. Using melting ice simply and directly recalls the temporal problem of melting glaciers and ice sheets. I utilize the artistic tools of beauty and humor to engage the political. I believe that a poetic approach is vital to changing societal perceptions. As philosopher Jacques Ranciére discusses, art has the power to redistribute the sensible (what is sensed: seen, heard, felt) by creating new forms and ways of seeing. It is through this redistribution of the sensible that change occurs. My photographs, sculptures, drawings and videos take on a pressing and all-encompassing issue using humor, beauty and poetics. As artist and curator Randy Jayne Rosenberg says, "Art allows us to visualize our relationship to the natural world. Art has a rich set of tools to represent our world, from irony to allegory, metaphor to humor."* These are the tools that have the power to change societal perceptions about climate change. <br><br>
* Natural World Museum. Art in Action Nature, Creativity, and Our Collective Future. Minneapolis: Earth Aware Editions, 2007.
- Biography:
- Rebecca was born and grew up in western Montana where she learned to climb trees and cliffs, navigate white water, breathe, and create art.<br><br>
Potts received her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and her B.A. in Geography and Studio Art from Middlebury College in Vermont. She studied at the Centre for the Arts at the University of Tasmania in Australia. <br><br>
Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally. Potts has taught various art courses, coordinated community murals, and curated an exhibit entitled "Science Makes Art." She has also campaigned for clean energy in Vermont and worked as a community organizer to improve water quality in Camden, NJ. <br><br>
She is currently the Visual Arts Editor for www.ClimateChangeEducation.org. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
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