AMY PEKAL
RESEARCH
The Department for Natureculture Affairs is a fictitious institution operating alongside local non-profits, government and mutual-aid initiatives, wherever it lands. Since 2022 The Department for Natureculture Affairs has committed to building infrastructures for living with more-than-human worlds in Brooklyn, New York specifically in the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Driven by a series of artist-facilitated gatherings called Field Harvests, I invite my neighbors to establish relational forms of becoming-with the living world. These activities include Noticing Acts - prompts and instructions of seeing yourself as part of your environment, fermentation workshops, gardening, seed bomb and cyanotype making as well as simply gathering and dreaming, together.
Photo: Walking Sticks, 2021 credit: Karolina Zajączkowska
research
gatherings
ARTWORKS
Recent paintings give focus to the materiality of the living world. Collaged and layered, the small intimate paintings depict the process of woodland restoration in Prospect Park. This body of work embraces the complexity and density present in NYC’s urban parklands.
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Compost and Other Means of Assembly consider’s compost as a continuous prototype, an object that can be repeated and remade, one that is not fixed or permanent. This work was brought forth in generous collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Art U-Jazdowski Castle, and the University of Warsaw Botanic Garden in Warsaw, Poland.
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Reframing Kinship investigates how Western culture frames nature. However, when we idealize the landscape, we no longer notice the spontaneity or the ecologies that sustain it. Reframing Kinship emerges from a series of participatory acts with the landscape that draw on necessary processes to sustain life on a Dutch polder. In doing so, the work reveals the tensions and contradictions of developing a closer relationship with landscape; one that is ongoing, bio-diverse and demands participation.
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The Possible Polder is a series of paintings made to document the complexity of a biodiverse ecosystem. The paintings are documents of various plant speices layered between plein-air painting and abstraction to create a dense and compressed composition that speaks to the experience of the living world.
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The Possible Garden responds to the seasonal processes and cycles of living and dying in the now. The botanical elements of the painting are rendered to compress the background and foreground of the picture plane and embody the ambiguity of living and dying simultaneously.
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Echoes documents the resilient transformation of the pueblo of Nirvilio, Chile as it recovered from devastating wildfires. The paintings document the capacities and resilient motives of both the land and the inhabitants who endured and worked with the conditions before them.
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