Capturing CU in a Collaborative Collage: a natural portrait from foraged finds

As a recipient of a 2023 Urbana Arts and Culture grant, I lead a community art project the generated large-format botanical collage sourced only from local materials by residents.

What is the Urbana Arts Grant community-based project?

I partnered with Julia Pollack, who is the creator and curator of the Art of Science program at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at UIUC. With this partnership between Secret Gardens CU and the Art of Science we brought the public and the community of Urbana and Champaign interactive creative opportunities to experience the connective tissues of science, art, and community. The project culminated in creating one HUGE 3-D botanical collage similar to my usual work, but that only included community-sourced and donated objects. 

Contributors from the area focused on foraging and donating locally-sourced materials, including leaves, flowers, insects, mushrooms, bark, moss, rocks, sticks, lichen and more. We partnered with a few local businesses and organizations to make sure everyone could participate, even if they didn’t have an opportunity to forage. At our farmer’s market booth for donation drop-off, we had flowers available for visitors to select and donate to the project.

Those contributing items for the art piece were also asked to share anything about the specimen they donated–a poem, an interesting fact about the species, a story associated with it, or really anything else that can be shared in written word that they wanted the community to know. These written tidbits were integrated into the digital story map that mapmaker Wendy Dorman developed to show the general location of all donated specimens along with their species name and any other shared information. The final digital map is publicly accessible online, and complements the final art piece, providing two ways to envision the natural objects representing our community. The map can be explored here. The frame was made by local artist and wood worker Nathan Westerman.

The final piece was raffled off for free, with anyone who contributed to the piece having a chance to win it. The winner was Edith Peacock, owner of H2O Hair Salon in downtown Urbana, which was quite fitting given her constant support of local artists and small businesses. The piece hangs in her salon today for all to enjoy.

To see the story that covered the project, check out the story here: Community-wide collaborative art piece features locally foraged flora and fauna