Evangeline (Before and After)

original painting by Heather Bird Harris
Evangeline (Before and After)  2022
 
wetland soil watercolors donated from Grand Chenier/Atakapa-Ishak land, water and ink on raw canvas
 
31" x  31"
framed in maple
 
On view at Arts New Orleans' SALON Gallery + Studios at Canal Place April 3 - April 21.
 
 
 
ABOUT THE PIECE:
Evangeline (Before and After) is made from watery color fields of dark wetland soil and orange clay paint from southern Louisiana. The wetland soils were collected by a soil scientist to study the effectiveness of wetland conservation strategies in Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, Grand Chenier, Louisiana, and were then donated to the artist at the conclusion of the study. Harris then processed the soil samples into fine pigments which became the first layers of each painting. From there, she added water and synthetic color to the land and responded to forms and colors created as the land broke apart on the canvas.
 
The Evangeline paintings references landscape paintings from the late 1800s in which white male artists romanticized Louisiana and promoted her ‘untouched’ land as an invitation for white land ownership. Harris’s interpretations of the constructed landscape explore parallels between the treatment of women and the earth as well as the throughlines between colonization and Louisiana’s current environmental crises.