The Lay of the Lack of the Land: Exhibition Interview with Nicole Sara Simpkins

NOTE: These interviews have been edited for clarity and length. Interview conducted and edited by FreeQuency, Photos by danielle miles. “The Lay of the Lack of the Land” was on view at Antenna:3718 June-July, 2025. You can view a virtual tour of The Lay of the Lack of the Land on Antenna’s website and purchase a copy of the accompanying exhibition publication at Antenna’s online bookstore.

FreeQuency: We’re sitting here on the floor in the middle of your exhibition which is still in the process of going up. Tell me a little bit about this exhibition, what inspired you to do it in general and also why here, in this space, at this moment in time.

Nicole: I learned about Antenna’s programing some years ago, and applied to this open call twice. The second time, I proposed an exhibition that would turn my ongoing ecological research toward the lower Mississippi region, and my proposal was accepted! but I applied again and got accepted. 

I live in the upper Midwest in Minneapolis now, but I grew up in Massachusetts, near a salt marsh – the dance between the fragile resilience of wetlands and the really fertile muck of this meeting ground where all of these forces come together was an important part of what makes me see the world the way I do. 

For about eight years, my work has been wrestling with the central metaphor of a culturally created problem of, quote, ‘invasive plant species’, unquote. I proposed doing a more direct investigation of what had previously been a background thread in my work – what are the preexisting conditions that happen before these quote, ‘invasive plants’, unquote, show up? Those pre-existing conditions are the legacies of and the ongoing practices of extractive colonialism. 

I had proposed connecting all of those threads at an exhibition here at Antenna:3718. I came down to Louisiana a few times over the course of the past year to do more in-person research – to investigate abandoned oil rig structures and the confluence of the presence of that industrial architecture and its abandonment in relationship with ecology. 

FreeQuency: How does that relate to the title of the exhibition? How did the title ‘The Lay of the Lack of the Land’ come to be? 

Nicole: It’s funny – I came to New Orleans in January. [I have] a dear friend living in Houston named Paty Lorena Solorzano – who is a choreographer and dancer making work about weeds and plants as a metaphor for migration – we’d been collaborating, working together and adventuring in New Orleans and Houston. I was describing what I had been learning about the engineering of the Mississippi River and the rate of subsidence in southern Louisiana and the forces leading to that and someone said something about ‘the lay of the land’, and I replied, ‘or the lay of the lack of the land’, and thought, ‘oh! I like that as a title’ – taking a really commonplace turn of phrase and tweaking it felt musical and relevant to the subject matter. 

FreeQuency: How did you decide what materials to incorporate into this exhibition? 


Nicole: I have been making large scale installation based work for a while and I had been working on paper up until a few years ago when I remembered the textiles exist [laughter]. 
Textiles are so magical. They’re so versatile, they’re so alive.

I love to work really large. I love to take up a lot of space and create immersive environments and doing that with paper is really hard, expensive and impractical. Paper is really fragile. 


This whole installation fit into two suitcases, and I flew with it here. I thought a lot about the materials I’m using. The tapestries with the imagery of the oil refineries on them are printed on repurposed polyester that I bought very cheaply on Facebook marketplace. They were someone’s wedding decorations. 

I have been increasingly thinking about the use of plastic and petrochemical byproducts and trying to not use new plastic materials. Some of this work is screen printing, which is acrylic ink and the screen printing process ends up using a bunch of problematic stuff. But, using repurposed polyester felt like an interesting way of incorporating this material – it’s a Petrochemical byproduct with imagery of petrochemical extraction on it. 


The tapestries  with the plants on them are printed on silk gauze, which is a protein based fiber made from tiny magical little worms…its material qualities are so enchanting. It’s so transparent and luminous -
it has this completely different material presence. 

Whether ethically, it’s better or worse, I don’t know. I bought it from a supplier that purchased it from a factory in China, right? 
And it’s a new material, which is problematic. 

More and more, I’m really curious about being in conversation with materials and recognizing that if I were going to be perfectly ethical in my use of materials, I really wouldn’t be able to make work. Trying to achieve ethical purity leads to a very self-defeating attitude , but having generative conversations with myself about the meaning and origin and material qualities of the things I use is really compelling to me. Asking those questions while I was making this work was part of what shaped how this work looks. 

There’s little embellishments of repurposed lace at the tops of the prints with the plants in them, and there are impressions of lace throughout the prints on the polyester tapestry. That was all sourced from free piles at thrift stores and things friends gave me. 
I have ideas about what that is a metaphor for, but I am curious to see how people interpret that or what meanings they ascribe to it.

FreeQuency: if someone has to come in here? 
What do you hope they would feel as a moved through the space and what do you hope they would take away from the space? 

Nicole: I really want to create conditions for curiosity, for feeling a kind of wonder and awe…a feeling that no matter where you stand, you can’t see everything at once and there’s no one path to take as you navigate the work. 

These are the ways I feel in my body when I’m studying conditions in the field – when I’m looking at what plants are doing and how they’re entwined with culture and the world – there’s this sense of complexity and immersion and curiosity. It’s really overwhelming because it’s infinitely entangled and I’m just a tiny little being enmeshed in all of these other beings and materials. 

I want to create an environment that promotes that sense of being immersed, being small, being overwhelmed, but then having a sense of wonder about that overwhelming experience. 

FreeQuency: Anything else you want to make sure it is noted about the exhibition? 

Nicole: Just a plug for print making.  I love the way printmaking can exist in a more accessible form. You can make work that you hang on a wall and you can also reproduce images and texts that have a life out in the streets, or you can also create elements that are reproduced to make these large scale, immersive, environments, and the conversation between those different aspects of print making is really generative. 

When I finish a big body of work, I’ll often go back and work in the two dimensional realm and create some images and then I’ll keep building it until it becomes this again. 

The history of printmaking evolved as a way to circulate information, to create multiples, and to take up space. Printmakers also love to find new ways of using outmoded technologies. All of this is important to shaping the type of artist I am! 

FreeQuency: And what type of artist is that? 

Nicole: A print maker who likes to explode out of the frame! 

FreeQuency: My last question for you – you mentioned you did a lot of research – is there anything else you want to share about your process for this exhibition?

Nicole: I am thankful to Antenna for offering me this opportunity. When I found out, I reached out to the artist, Hannah Chalew and she gave me a list of suggestions for things to follow up on. 

One of them was [Captain] Richie Blink who runs a project called Delta Discovery Tours. He lives down in the Delta about an hour and a half south of New Orleans. I went out with him twice. He’s so fascinating and really amazing at articulating the complexities of what’s going on in Southern Louisiana and the Delta in terms of ecology, labor, extraction, politics, scientific research, the engineering of the Mississippi, etc. Those trips, the reading and the digesting I did afterwards, the following of threads I encountered through those trips…that is what shaped this work. I’m super grateful to both of them for being so generous with their knowledge. 

I love to do research. I can get into a real research rabbit hole and then get more and more overwhelmed and get the same sense that I described of trying to create with my work – this sense that things are so rich and complex…how could I ever say anything? or ever get to the bottom of all of these questions? or ever know enough or read enough or be respectful enough of other people’s research and life’s work and activism to like be worthy of making work about any of us. 

…I get to that point and then I’m like, okay, I don’t know, I just got to go to the studio. The only way through that existential crisis is to start materializing what I’m thinking about. 

I also have a writing practice. There’s something about getting overwhelmed by research that I can only solve by wrestling with materials – What type of fabric am I going to use? Why doesn’t that print work when I tried to do it that way? How could I do it this way? [I go] back and forth between two dimensions and three dimensions – back and forth between the intellectual, spiritual, esoteric research inquiry and the wrestling with materials [that] is important to my work. 

The accompanying exhibition publication was such an incredible aspect of this opportunity from Antenna. Writing has always been part of my work, but I’ve really foregrounded my work as a visual artist. For five or six years, I’ve been saying to myself, I really want to write an essay. I really need to publish an essay and I’ll write a draft, and get partway through…and then it just kind of…

I’ve done so much work to overcome the existential dread that making visual work creates, but I don’t have the same resilience when it comes to writing…I can talk myself out of following through with it…but knowing that I had this opportunity to have this book printed made me be like, all right, here we go! Let’s just bust this out. It was like this feeling…these poems really wanted to get out of me. They were like, we are ready!
Give us a place! 

FreeQuency: it’s so interesting how a container sometimes allows you to finally give shape to the things that have been flooding you for so long.

Nicole: Right, in this case, it’s a series of prose poems. Originally, I thought I would write an essay, but as I said in the introduction to the book, even though I think essays can be playful and experimental, there’s still a sense that an essay is written from a clear voice that’s speaking from a place of some degree of having authority over the subject matter. I recognized there’s no way I could speak from that place about a whole constellation of things, that I’m a guest here.

I’m not from this area, and even if I were, it’s so infinitely complex…but writing prose poems allowed me to move between voices and speak in a way that is more dispersed…I referenced, this book Hospicing Modernity Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism at the beginning, too, where the writer talks frames it as “worlding” versus “wording”, where “wording” is an aspect of Western modernity – trying to claim a truth that is singular and defined. This is opposed to a “worlding”, which is much more relational and about metaphor. If you read or hear a worlding story, and hear it again one day, or 10 days later or 10 days later…you are going to be in a relationship with that story and it will shape and change as you shape and change. That way of describing the possibilities of a text felt more in line with the truth of what I was writing from. 

It’s kind of funny – they all have end notes, and then there’s a work cited…a bibliography…

FreeQuency: I did that in my latest book of poetry! I was thinking when you were talking about essays as facts that poems are facts too, but in different kinds of ways. 

Nicole: Yes! It was really fun because the poems are written in an abstract way, some of them are kind of funny, or playful even. But having end notes let me also add a bit of expository context. Then there’s images that accompany the poems – some of which are photos I took while I was on those research trips, some of them are drawings that I made in preparation for the show or prints or things like that. 


The exhibition text is a really cool artifact. One of the troubles of installation work is that you really can’t capture the experience in photos and once it comes down, it will never exist in this form again, but a book can go and have its own little life.

It’s such an amazing aspect of this opportunity that I’m really excited about it.