Through diverse mediums, (UN)EARTHED: through air, tied to each other explores ideas of nonlinearity and dreamspaces in a world marked by environmental change, displacement, and eroding certainties. With disorientation as an underlying theme, these artists suggest that entanglement is found not in fixed roots, but in the shared exposure of continuous (un)earthing. 

Transformation and speculative worldmaking allow me to approach woodcut print from a place of curiosity, where carved lines, like roots of an old growth forest, act as a life force. In my pieces, creatures and costumes serve as intermediaries. They are a bridge to stepping into collaborative ways of being beyond systems of control, with elements of biomimicry that challenge the extraction, objectification, categorization, and targeting of people and lands. With insight from Queer ecology, where nature is understood outside of human-made binaries, the beings and posters in my practice blur lines between the strange and beautiful, the real and imagined, the spectacle and familial, the satirical and serious, and the image and text. In merging these ideas with the practice of political printmaking, I seek to move beyond complacency and toward collective justice, with the understanding that new worlds must be first imagined in order to be actualized. 

Artist Bio:

Elana (Oak) Morchower is an artist and activist specializing in woodcut printmaking. Their lived experience as a Queer person growing up in and doing advocacy work in the Southern US has pushed them to explore alternative worlds where multiple truths can exist. 

Morchower holds a BFA in Studio Art and Urban Environmental Studies from Birmingham-Southern College, Birmingham, Alabama, United States (2024) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Art and Ecology at the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland (anticipated graduation 2026). They live and work between Atlanta, Georgia, USA and Ballyvaughan, Ireland. Morchower has worked as a teaching artist at the Chattahoochee Nature Center in Roswell, GA, the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, AL and the Magic City Art Connection’s Imagination Festival in Birmingham, AL. They have exhibited work throughout the Southeast United States in Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; Woodstock, Georgia, and more recently in Ballyvaughan and Galway, IE, including in community-based fundraisers for Palestine. Morchower’s work has been supported by a residency at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. Their work has also been featured on an album cover and was published in and awarded by The Western Border Literary and Arts Magazine. Much of Morchower’s practice centers around activism and they have helped coordinate several art-based mutual aid events and workshops in the US and in Ireland.

Karen St Pierre is a multidisciplinary artist working across collage, photography, abstraction, and installation. Her work explores perception and the fragile architectures of memory.   Layered, visual environments are built from fragments of photographs, painted papers, textiles, and remnants of earlier work. Gathered and recomposed, these materials carry traces of lived experience: impressions of the natural world, ephemera that hold glimpses of other lives, and echoes of earlier creative gestures.  Her current work is informed by encounters with eldercare and memory loss.  By constructing spaces where fragments persist, dissolve, and recombine, her installations and smaller works mirror the shifting nature of perception and remembrance.

Artist Bio:

Karen’s work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including On the Move at the EPIC Museum in Dublin; The Intuitive Eye at G.A. Gallery in Tokyo; Free Range at the Byrdcliffe/Kleinert Gallery in Woodstock, New York; and the 2024 ELIA European Emerging Artists Showcase. She has participated in residencies at the Royal College of Art in London and the Vermont Studio Center.

Karen divides her time between New York and Ireland, and is currently completing her MFA in Studio Art at the Burren College of Art, University of Galway. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University and an MA in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California.

Alongside her studio practice, she has worked across curatorial and arts initiatives, including grants administration for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, producing online master classes for The Juilliard School, and editing interdisciplinary art-and-neuroscience content for the Rubin Museum of Art’s Brainwave series. Her collage and photography are featured in the annual Woodstock Travel Guide, and the books Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance, and Staging Steinbeck.

Sarah Vandermeer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how human attempts to control and organize nature, instead revealing an ecological strangeness and layers of enchantment within the environment. Working across painting, sculpture, and video, she uses special fx imitation, replication, and visual sleight of hand to highlight the strangeness of the natural world.  This current body of work is located within psychogeographic wanderings through Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) forests in Ireland. The landscapes hint at hidden potential. One can feel the squish of the moss and the stillness in the air. Walking among the trees, one feels the results of industrial forestry – like we are invading their space, as if the land knows these tightly packed trees are temporary, planted for yield, and cut down in sweeping clearfells. Beneath layers of human control, alternative dynamics of life and agency persist. Philosopher, Timothy Morton, sums it up well in The Ecological Thought when he writes, ‘there is indeed an environment, yet when we examine it, we find it is made of strange strangers. Our awareness of them isn’t always euphoric, charming, or benevolent. Environmental awareness might have something intrinsically strange about it, as if we were seeing something that is normally hidden – as if we realized we were caught in something.’ Vandermeer’s work illustrates this feeling, as if we are the invaders in some private assembly or a staged play where all is not as it seems, that things may act upon each other with a quiet, secret sympathy. By inviting viewers to encounter both the staging and the play, the work opens a provisional world in which agency can be reimagined.

Wonder emerges as a way of relating to uncertainty when meaning cannot be fixed or guaranteed.

Artist bio:

Sarah Vandermeer (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, and writing. Currently based in Ireland, she graduated from Pratt Institute in 2012 with a degree in sculpture, developing a practice rooted in narrative-driven, immersive projects. After relocating to New Orleans in 2013, Vandermeer served as scenic designer for Intramural Theater and co-founded the
production company All of Them Witches with two other artists, where she serves as creative director and production designer for numerous music videos for local and nationally acclaimed artists. She has been widely exhibited, designed book and album covers, and appeared twice on the cover of Current Affairs magazine. At Burren College of Art, her focus on ecology expands her practice while remaining informed by her theatrical and narrative strategies from New Orleans.