The Lay of the Lack of the Land by Nicole Sara Simpkins :: Nicole Sara Simpkins
On View :: Sat. Jun. 14th, 2025 - Sun. Jul. 27th, 2025
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Nicole Sara Simpkins is the recipient of Antenna’s 2025 Solo National Exhibition. This collection of prose poems integrates research about the predicaments of engineering, extraction, and changing ecosystems in the Mississippi River. Featuring photos, drawings, prints, notes and references, this publication was produced in tandem with an exhibition of large-scale installation-based printmaking. The cross-disciplinary work of Nicole Sara Simpkins combines printmaking, writing, and drawing to explore entanglements of culture, ecosystems, and personal healing. Her work has been supported by 2024 and 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a 2022 Mcknight Fellowship in Printmaking, a 2023 fellowship to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St. Andrews, Scotland, as well as by artist residencies and fellowships at Women’s Studio Workshop, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Millay Arts, Ucross, Jentel, Artspace Raleigh and The Vermont Studio Center. She lives in South Minneapolis and she really loves learning about plants.
Artist Statement: My work uses printmaking, writing, and drawing to investigate how landscapes change over time, and how we shape, respond to, and talk about these changes. I carve botanically accurate linoleum prints of so-called invasive plant species. I combine these prints with salvaged textiles to construct large-scale installations of cut and sewn layers. With intricate hand-stitching, knotting and joining, I engage in a ritual of mending.
In my research, I study the cultural context that frames plants as enemy combatants. Bearing witness to loss, I notice which plants thrive under impossible conditions, and which plants struggle to cope. I study the impossible conditions, and I study the entwined reactions of plants and humans.
This work is timely; rooted in ecology, it unveils the divisive cultural projections placed on plants. Those of us who care for ecosystems often defend their threatened status within the framework of war, competition, borders and anti-immigration. Such language justifies the use of toxic herbicides and costly control measures within shrinking tracts of undeveloped land. While these measures poison everyone’s soil and water (oaks, buckthorn, microbiota and humans alike), they do not stop the escalating loss of habitat or the cultural addiction to resource extraction. Meanwhile, this framework reinforces an authoritarian approach to controlling beings who are struggling to cope, adapt, and survive in the face of rapid change and loss.
These lush tapestries are designed to respond by enfolding viewers in complexity. There is no one path through my installation work, and there is no one vantage point from which all can be seen clearly. Intricate hand cutting begins to look like life being eaten away. Rich, unusual embroidery begins to look like mycelial webs, reweaving. Botanical prints flourish in almost-domestic patterns: an invitation to come home to the vast, precarious, impossible complexity of this moment on earth. It asks: The land is changing; how are we going to change along with it?
Exhibition Statement: In preparation for this exhibition at Antenna, I read, wrote, and traveled to New Orleans, visiting the delta (with Richie Blink of Delta Discovery Tours as my guide!) to witness the entanglements of changing ecosystems and the remnants of oil and gas extraction facilities. The experience of witnessing these places in my body informed this current work. After my visits to the delta, it seems clearer than ever that these structures – and the multi-faceted exploitation they enable – are the real invasive species. If all living species alter the environments in which they grow, these structures are powerfully alive.
I drew these images of oil wells and compressor stations from reference photos I took while observing these so-called “orphaned” structures. When I draw, I take forms in; it’s more than seeing. Forms enter me through my eyes and my psyche, and they pass through my hands into the material realm. My understanding is changed by making drawings.
I carved the drawings into linoleum, then inked and printed them onto cloth and paper. I used repurposed polyester for the large-scale installation works depicting refineries – bought in great volume for little expense second hand (after it was used for wedding decorations, incidentally) – petroleum extraction onto petroleum byproduct.
Many of these prints are embedded with patterns of lace, or printed onto lace: I see this as the trace of culpability: domestic comforts and convenience are made possible by the mass extraction and processing of petroleum. It is my hope that, through metaphor, by linking image, material and psyche, I make a little space for bearing witness to things as they are. Maybe this makes it more possible to imagine ourselves out of this mess.
Suspended in alternating layers with these built forms are repeat patterns of “invasive” species such as water hyacinth, phragmites and tallow tree. It’s true that the presence of these plants is troubling! Even I, who question the impact of herbicidal eradication measures of buckthorn and tansy in my home state, felt awed by the long corridors of water hyacinth stretching far into the wetlands. Nonetheless, I present these plants in repeating patterns on delicate layers of silk gauze. The patterns hover between feral and domestic; the silk as delicate as the human scale of a life.
In Anna Tsings’ words, Despite all insults, resurgence has not yet ceased. In my words: I yearn for the oaks and mourn the cypress swamps, and I want them to survive, but I’m in awe that any plants are flourishing at all. I wonder what future they might be suggesting, with their unknowable, green intentions.
