Considering Art Podcast – Genevieve Robertson, art meets environmental science

Introduction to Genevieve Robertson

0:00Hello, Bob Chawndy here with another Considering Art podcast in which I talk to an artist about their work and something of their life. Genevieve Robertson's practice combines art in the form of drawing, painting, printmaking and video with environmental science. She lives and works in

0:34a forested area of British Columbia in Canada where logging is widespread and she focuses on ecosystems such as wildfire sites and marine shorelines. What's more, she connects her art with ancient ecological and biological history by using natural materials like coal, charcoal and bitumen which have been formed over millions of years. With these she creates images both abstract and figurative. These locally sourced materials carry all sorts of fascinating histories of disturbance,

1:05regrowth and the relationship to us humans. Genevieve exhibits mainly in Canada but her latest show has just opened at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham. It's entitled Under the Orange Sticks of the Sun and it consists of drawings she's made over the past eight years or so. As well as referencing the slopes of British Columbia, some of her newest works are site-specific, inspired by the ancient swamps of the so-called Black Country. Genevieve spoke with me from Birmingham.

1:36Genevieve, welcome to the podcast. Lovely to see you. Thank you so much, Bob. Nice to see you too. And you're over in Birmingham now for this exhibition? That's right, yeah.

Genevieve's Background

1:48I read that you're of mixed European settler ancestry. What's all that about?

1:55Well, my dad is British. He's British-Scottish but he grew up in London and so I'm a dual citizen although I've never lived in Britain myself. But I have family. My twin brother lives in Oxford and then my mum is a long-time, like a fifth-generation Vancouver settler. So that's a bit about my background. And what did your parents do? You were brought up in British Columbia, weren't you? I was, yeah. And they were, they're kind of interesting. My dad came over from London and immediately started working as a tree planter in the 70s,

2:36which was a pretty common occupation at that. Still is, but at that time maybe even more. They both worked and organised a tree planting cooperative in British Columbia. So my brother and I were brought up between these quite remote logging and tree planting camps and then in Vancouver halftime as well. Right. So you planted trees yourself, did you? I did. Yeah, I started when I was 14. My dad trained me and passed on the profession, the family profession in a way.

3:14And it's also kind of a rite of passage for a lot of Canadians because the forestry industry in Canada, it legally has to be replanted. So there's a lot of work because the forestry industry is large. It's a big part of our export. So, yeah, it's a common job, but I did it for a long time. And because it was kind of a family lineage, it was part of my identity through my 20s and kind of impacted my work and how I kind of developed my artwork.

Logging Area Topography

3:47Tell us about the topography of the logging area, Genevieve. You know, give us an idea of its environmental history as well. Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, it really changes depending on where you are in the province and the way that the forestry industry has changed has also impacted the landscape. So I'd say that when my parents started, a lot of what was happening in forestry is that they were just replanting, even if they'd logged a forest that was primarily kind of a wet climate or microclimate,

4:26and they'd logged cedar and spruce, they'd still replant it with pine because pine grows the fastest and is the easiest to harvest again in 50 years. So it was sort of monocropping and it looked a lot like kind of an agricultural practice at that time. And it still to a degree does. They're still logging in order to re-harvest or planting in order to re-harvest, but it's developed by miles.

5:00There's a lot more thoughtful forestry happening and sustainable practices, and they're replanting trees that belong in that ecosystem. And have there been lots of environmental problems caused by logging and mineral extraction in the region? Absolutely. Yeah. Certainly many, many environmental problems. I think the way that forestry has been managed has impacted all, I mean, of course, climate change has impacted the prevalence of forest fires in Western Canada,

5:34but logging has also had a big impact and kind of forest management practices in general. And then it also negatively impacts how waterways are affected. So waterways become more polluted and removing trees can cause a lot more issues like flooding and sloughing of landscapes. So whole kind of mountains can fall because they don't have the roots to hold them in place anymore.

6:05So fisheries have been negatively impacted. So there's a whole slew of ways in which it's been quite damaging to the overall ecosystem. And just to give you a sense, if you fly over British Columbia, it's mostly been logged. And you can kind of see different areas that are further on in their regeneration process. But it's a real patchwork of resource extraction.

Slope Series and Wildfire Sites

6:32You did a series called Slope over a period of years, didn't you, in which you filmed and photographed wildfire sites. Some of them actually have flames there. Wasn't that a dangerous occupation?

6:47No, because so that's actually the work that that's part of the work that has ended up here in Birmingham. And I've kind of retitled it over the course of the year last year. So what I did is I visited one forest fire for the course over the course of four years and kind of watched it through that regeneration process. So when I first visited it, it was still flaming, but it was it wasn't like a full blown, really active fire.

7:18And in fact, on the forest fire app that we have in D.C., it was I think it was finished and but it was still burning. So that just goes to show how much they're dealing with every season, every fire season. Right. Yeah. Did you do much art growing up? I certainly did. Yeah. I think from an early age, I was always drawing and painting to some degree. I was always really imaginative and interested in connecting with the natural world, too.

7:50So I remember that from very early on, like those were kind of my two passions. And it took me a long time to figure out how to bring together in a professional practice, my interest in the environment and in art. Did you study both, really? I did. Yeah, I mostly I've studied visual art. Like I've gone through, done a bachelor's and a master's of fine art, but I also did some graduate work in environmental studies.

8:21And so that actually really did frame. It kind of gave me a way to create a groundwork to bring the two practices together. Right. Was the environmental crisis the catalyst for your art making? Um, I'd say that it's kept me here. Like I feel really dedicated to continuing to work in this way. It's the only way that makes sense to me. I never really questioned it at all.

8:53I wouldn't say that it was necessarily the environmental crisis that catalyzed it. But I'd say I'd lived all over the place in Canada and abroad, and I came back to my home province to do my master's. And I think how things started to come together is I started to think about how can I kind of tell my own story through my art and get to understand the place that I grew up through a more critical and creative lens.

9:24Right. But did you also feel an urge to raise consciousness about climate change and what effect it's having in Canada?

9:33Yes, I think definitely I'm interested in being part of those conversations, whether they're directly climate change. Sometimes they absolutely are. And sometimes it's more specific. Sometimes it's about hydro damming in a specific valley or the pollution of waterways. So it depends. But I'd say I'm really interested in complicating a simple view of nature as both clean and pure and also under threat.

10:04Because I mean, of course, it's under threat. But I also think there's still a lot of thriving going on. So I'm kind of interested in bringing a richness to the narrative. And that includes climate change and ecological justice.

Materials and Stories

10:18Well, the materials you use play a central role in your work. You use things like found coal, charcoal, bitumen, plantings, seawater, the list goes on. What do these materials, what stories do they hold? I think that's a really key part of how my practice has kind of developed over the past 10 years, because that's a real connection to an interest in climate directly, because some of these materials are so charged in our given, in our contemporary kind of cultural understanding of climate change.

10:56So people hear the words crude oil and bitumen and coal on the news and carbon emissions. And I wanted to kind of try to bring a material weight and substance to some of those kind of abstracted charged words that come up. And I've found that people really connect with the ability to kind of see those materials in a piece of work. And I've also connected with them through producing the work.

11:27So for me, it's a very rich way to connect the work I'm doing to climate. And, you know, when I'm not talking about coal and bitumen, I think every material holds a story of the place it came from, and sometimes the culture that is present in that place. And so I think it's just a really kind of, for me, a rich way to learn about a place and to dig into the kind of geologic history of materials and environmental history.

12:00Well, give me an example about, say, coal and charcoal. These are the result of vegetation, I think, that's been there for millions of years and broken down and formed these substances. Is that right? Coal is, yeah. And the charcoal I'm using is mostly wildfire derived. And again, it's from, of course, a combusted living material. So it's natural.

12:30It's natural. Yeah, it's carbon based. And I think with those materials, I moved to the region I currently live in about eight years ago. And it's, it's much more affected by wildfire than Vancouver on the coast of, of British Columbia. So I wasn't used to these like dark wildfire seasons, where the whole sky is smoky sometimes for a month or two. And so I was impacted by that. And I started thinking about, this is the first time I started thinking, how can I study carbon and allow it to teach me about, you know, carbon as a drawing material, as a periodic element, as something that's so central to climate change as well.

13:15So, and then also learn about this specific place. So through that project, I, I worked with coal from these large open pit mines in the East Kootenays, and then wildfire charcoal from fires in a similar region. And then there's also a graphite mine close to where I live, which is also pure carbon. And that material is used for hydrogen cells in renewable energy. So it was three kind of pure forms of carbon that were all used in various different ways, or, you know, products of human development, anthropocentric action on the landscape.

13:57So that, that was kind of a really formative way to think about place and material through that. And you did, you've done a series, haven't you, called Carbon Study and a book, Walking in the Dark. These are shapes drawn with charcoal from forest fires, as you say, and coal. And there's a beautiful drawing of, of lichen, which I believe is in this exhibition too. Carbon is a very essential substance, isn't it, to life?

14:28Absolutely. Yeah, and I really wanted, that's another aspect of, of, I think my work is consciously trying to bring back the life forms that become abstracted over millennia. But that, yes, the carbon that we're, we're burning through coal, the carbon that's burning through forest fires really comes from these primordial, or some of it comes from these primordial plants and creatures and trying to kind of bring that life forward for us to consider now.

15:01I have to add one material that you use in Endless Body series, and that's breast milk. How on earth does breast milk get in there? Yes, well, that, that series was really different for me. It's almost much more, I mean, it's all personal, of course, but I, I, in 2021, I had twins, but they're now four and a half. And so for the first time ever, I was, I couldn't really do my, my typical practice.

15:33I couldn't go out very far from home and explore these places that I found really thought provoking. So I had to kind of reframe the way I was working. And so I kind of imagined myself into these specific ecosystems and was thinking also about how to kind of portray the interconnection between life forms and between humans and plants and animals and on different scales. So the piece that you're referring to, I was exploring kind of my own lack of boundaries in a way, like physical boundaries.

16:11And that was a time when I was obviously breastfeeding to infants. So you're the kind of parameters of your, your own sense of self are very different at that time. So I wanted to bring that into the work. Very opportunist. Yeah. There's a lovely abstract you've done called milk in brackets plateau. I believe that's in your current. Oh, yes. And your monument Creek Wildhouse studies, you're using these materials, as you say, to connect your environmental studies with, with your art.

16:46But when you're doing abstracts, are the forms you use, are they based on anything you've seen or are you just using your imagination intuitively? I think it's definitely a combination of both. Like I gravitate towards forms that can be a little bit ambiguous and some of the objects or forms I draw do have are derived from a natural form that I've seen. And then some of them kind of develop as more of my own personal lexicon or this language of shapes and forms that kind of repeat through my practice.

17:27And the one you're referring to, the milk, the large scale abstract piece, that, that was a mix because I was looking at maps of the plateau in the Rocky Mountains near where I live. So I was looking at kind of high level survey maps. And then I was also looking at fossils that were embedded in that plateau. So kind of thinking about how to portray micro and macro scales at the same time. In another series called Language for the Rack Zone Grid, you say, and I quote, you know,

18:02preliminary drawings imagine amorphous forms that exist between biology and geology, waste and treasure, petrification and liveliness, emergence and decay. Can you expand on that a bit, what you're trying to do there? Yeah, sure. I mean, that goes back several years now. That was kind of early work when I was starting to work with materials and building my language a little bit more, I'd say. But I was at that project, I was walking along the shoreline and became very on the Pacific Ocean and became very, very interested in that Rack Zone space because it's, it's the space where human produced waste washes up.

18:48If there's an oil spill, if there's an oil spill, that's the place that gets impacted the most. And then also in terms of the history of life going back millions of years, it's a very rich place where a lot of development happened of, of plants and animals as they kind of transition from the oceanic habitat to land habitat. So it is a place of life and then also seeing this detritus of our making that sort of washed up there.

19:21And with those forms, I was, I was finding these interesting forms on the beach that almost become indiscernible because they've been battered by the sea for so, so long. And some of them were, or are derived from, you know, garbage, but then they become homes for other creatures. And so there's this hybrid, hybridity that happens just through their, their life in the ocean and then on the shoreline. So I was really inspired by what I was finding through that process.

19:56Right. Just going back to materials, you mentioned bitumen. Now, bitumen, I always associated with the sticky substance that they build roads with. Is it sticky when you find it? Yeah, it is. It's actually a lot like, it smells a bit like the tar that's used for road building too. And when I found bitumen, I was up in the Athabasca tar sands up in Northern Alberta. And, you know, it's very ubiquitous.

20:27It's everywhere up there, but it's very industrialized space. So I found it from kind of going down into the Athabasca river bed into the Delta. And there it's just, you can find it. It's like part of the sand along the shoreline of the river. And it's very sticky. And it does smell a lot like what you're describing. So what you, you scoop it up and put it in a container and then draw with it. And it must be quite difficult to draw with if it's so sticky. Normally what I do, so some of the material I've used came from a kind of mentor and friend of mine who had already bought it as a powder because it is actually a traditional pigment.

21:09So you can actually buy bitumen. And so I got some from a friend, Marina Roy, who's a Canadian Vancouver-based artist. And then some of it, I, what I do when I work with materials is I don't just work with them raw. I often kind of have to grind them up and process them and add binders. So by the time I worked with bitumen, it's kind of in a different state than it was when I found it. But you always use these type of materials.

21:39You don't use paint or anything. Sometimes I do. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I try not to pigeonhole myself because sometimes I want to use paint. And of course, like these natural materials aren't like some paints have natural products in them. And so it's not really black and white. And I'm interested in that. Yeah. Not becoming too purist about the materials I'm choosing to use, I think.

22:09Okay. Let's talk about your current exhibition. It's called Under the Orange Sticks of the Sun. How did you come across that title? That title is from a Mary Oliver poem called Morning Poem. I think it was written in 1986.

22:27And Mary Oliver is a really well-known American poet. And I love her work. And I think that one of the reasons why I'm so drawn to her work is because she somehow has this way of bringing the reader back to this sense of kind of beauty and renewal, but not in a cheesy way. Um, and so that line is, is from a poem that's really, I think for me, it's, it speaks of hope and kind of every morning being another opportunity to, to continue kind of having hope, even in the direst of circumstances.

23:10So it kind of contains some darkness and some light, and I think that that, I relate to that in my practice, too. Of course, Birmingham is sort of on the edges of the, what we call the black country in the West Midlands, uh, which is the name because of the pollution from coal and iron foundries that sprang up during the industrial revolution. But in the press release, it talks about it's having ancient swamps, which obviously, if they had a coal industry there, that would, uh, be obvious, I suppose.

23:48Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, Roma, uh, the curator here and Deb, the director, I think became interested in my work initially because of its connection to coal and, and then through that, the black country. But, um, yes, absolutely. Those, all of the black country's coal mines at one point were these kind of rich, ecologically diverse, highly oxygenated swamps with two foot wingspan insects and massive bamboo.

24:21And so I wanted to kind of bring us back again to that, that environmental history and that long gone forest that still, of course, has an impact on our current environmental narrative and reality. Now, it says the exhibition will explore interconnection between the natural and industrial histories. That's easy to understand. Ecological trauma. That's also easy, but this got me, uh, scratching my head.

24:52And the vegetal and mycelial intelligence. What does that mean? Hmm. Um, so that is something that's quite new to me too, is this whole kind of philosophical world that's being explored that is about, um, a plant intelligence. And I've been reading this amazing, I'm not all the way through it, but this amazing book by Zoe Schlanger, I believe, called, um, The Light Eaters, which goes into the history of the, the real kind of interconnection between plants and humans.

25:28And how we wouldn't be here without plants and the kind of bringing back plants into the spotlight of how our world has developed and, and as well, our, um, our culture. And through that, there's conversation about plant intelligence. Of course, they don't have brains the way we do, but there's certain ways in which they, they do favor their own kin and make decisions across life.

25:58And, you know, figure out the best places for survival, which then they pass that knowledge on to their, to their kin. So they're, they're doing a lot of research and, and learning much more about plants than even five years ago. So it's not an area that I'm, I'm not a scientist and I don't have too much data on it, but it's really fascinating. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the exhibition, apart from lots of, of drawings, some of which we've mentioned, there are also drawings of, of bones, like hip joint, there's a scapula, there's a whale bone.

26:35This is really a, a glimpse into deep environmental and archeological history, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, and I think some of the coal was plant matter and some of it was animal matter. And the carboniferous period where a lot of coal derives from, there was like the hugest amphibians that have ever walked the earth. And as I said before, massive insects. So I wanted to bring those beings forward and also thinking about now and, you know, we're in a climate crisis, but we're also of course in a mass extinction.

27:12And I think I wanted to bring the animal into the exhibition as well. So there's some animals that are not bones and some that are, I mean, of course it references death and decay, but I think it's kind of, without sounding trite, it's kind of part of the life cycle. And so, yeah, it felt important to bring those images into the exhibition. Have you used in any of your drawings some locally found materials?

27:48I have used coal from the Dudley Living Museum. So that's been really, really exciting. Yeah, Roma and I went out there in January 2025 and I got us a sense of that place and the kind of culture that would have been in the Black Country area at that time. And we went to the Lapworth Museum and that was really great because I could kind of directly see some of the fossils that came from the Black Country mines. And so some of those, I took a lot of pictures and some of those fossils have snuck into the exhibition and there actually are going to be some fossils borrowed from the Lapworth Museum as part of the exhibition as well.

28:32You've said that the show has expanded your ecological thinking.

Ecological Thinking and Exhibition

28:36In what way? I think because I'm located in quite a remote area in Canada and I think that in one way really allows me to focus on these specific regions and has fed my kind of interest in working in relationship to place. But I think for me, creating a connection between this swamp that's halfway across the earth and my home province has kind of expanded literally geographically the kind of scope of the work, which has been really exciting.

29:14So I'd say that's a big, big part of it. And then also through this exhibition, I think I've, like, I think I've always kind of relied on when I'm talking about my work, talking about the science behind it. Again, as an artist, so that means I can be a little bit less specific than maybe a scientist would, but it allows me to tell those, those stories of geology. And I think through this exhibition, I've started more being able to kind of own the, I don't love the word spiritual, but kind of trying to bring that more directly into the way I describe the work a little bit.

30:00I found this word that I've been attracted to called incendence, which is the opposite of transcendence. And of course, transcendence is about, well, I can't really define it, but it's about transcending above the earth, above the living world. And incendence was coined by an eco-philosopher, Thomas Berry, and it's about really exploring the world as a spiritual practice, so going further into it.

30:31And I feel like something in this exhibition has allowed me to kind of zero in on that interest of looking at these tiny things, these pieces of history, and bringing them into a larger space and a larger kind of conversation. And I should add, you're really giving them a poetic expression through your art. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I hope so. So I think that's been exciting to kind of think about how to articulate that.

31:02Well, Genevieve, thanks so much for articulating this interview. It's been lovely listening to you. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Have a great day. Genevieve Robertson, delving into ancient ecology for her art. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Join me, Bob Chawndy, to consider more art again next week. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve.

31:34Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve. Thanks for listening to Genevieve.