Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

Ecology of Presence: Pathways to the Natural World

January 5, 2026 – March 8, 2026

Ecology of Presence: Pathways to the Natural World brings together the work of ten graduate students supported by the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History Art + Science Fellowship, a program dedicated to creative research connecting art with the natural world. Across media – including sound, moving image, music, text, performance, bookmaking, installation, comics, social practice, photography, and storytelling – the artists in Ecology of Presence emphasize relationality and careful attention to place as essential to building relationships with environs. As accelerating environmental change and technological dependency threaten ways of belonging, the works in this exhibition maintain a steadfast commitment to interdisciplinary approaches that propose kinship with the natural world. Collectively, the fellows’ artworks and social practices suggest ways of imagining human life in relation to more-than-human worlds, affirming how the synthesis of the arts, ecology, and the humanities can cultivate more responsible and reciprocal relationships with the natural world.

Land as Living Record
Several works engage land and environment as living records of memory, erasure, history, and resilience – active archives shaped by human intervention, and the passage of time. Through observation, documentation, and community-engaged research, the artworks make visible histories that persist in soil, stone, and water, inviting viewers to consider what it means to bear witness as land continues to change, recover, and remember.

Decolonial Storytelling
Challenging hierarchies that position humans as the primary storytellers, other works in the exhibition look to coyotes, hummingbirds, fog, weather, and rivers as active participants in creating knowledge. Informed and inspired by decolonial and Indigenous ways of knowing, these works invite us to experience stories shaped by movement, animal life, and the ecological forces that operate beyond human control.

Presence as Method
Unifying the exhibition is presence – an approach to research and creativity grounded in an attentive, embodied, and sustained engagement with place. Presence becomes the method by which more-than-human life is encountered as collaborator. This approach invites viewers to consider how attention shapes understanding: What new pathways to the natural world open when we meet it with presence?

Events

January 10 | 2 – 5 PM: Opening Reception