Land Portal is a walking tour and published resource by artists Ellie Irons and Aubrie James that reveals ecological and geological features throughout deCordova’s Sculpture Park. Through this project, Irons and James aim to “foster a sense of place (in space, and in time) by calling attention to the ‘background’—the vast, alive, and ever-transforming ‘negative space’ that makes up the parts of the museum and park that are not sculptures or artworks.”
By following their annotated map, visitors are drawn to lesser-known environmental sites of deCordova’s campus, including unique tree specimens, remnants of earlier agricultural land use, and bedrock shaped by glacial sheets. At each station, visitors can follow a series of activations to connect sky and earth and ground themselves further within the surrounding landscape.
About the Artists:
Ellie Irons is an artist and educator living and working on Mohican land in current-day Troy, New York, USA. From foraged watercolor paintings to un-lawning experiments, her work combines socially engaged art, ecology fieldwork, and embodied learning. She is a co-founder of the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency, collaborations investigating relationships between humans and spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds). Her solo and collaborative work has been part of recent exhibitions on contemporary environmental art, including Seeds: Containers of a World to Come at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and Unsettled Nature at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Irons received a BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. In December 2021, she completed a PhD in arts practice at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focused on socially engaged environmental art. Her book Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds was published by PS Hudson in spring 2023. She is currently Co-Director of The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab.
Aubrie James is an artist and scientist who uses her intimate understanding of ecology to probe systems of knowing—scientific, artistic, and otherwise. Her wide-ranging art practice intervenes on scientific convention to theorize ecology as an interactive practice of co-constructing internal (psychic) and external (material, organismic) landscapes. Holding a Bachelor’s Degree in Animal Ecology from Iowa State University and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University, her research led her to question how scientific convention had limited her perception and communication of the natural world. Her art practice began as scientific experiments which were covertly designed as land art, and has expanded to include sculpture, multimedia installation, and walks. She formalized her artistic practice with a Master of Science Degree in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT. Her artworks have been exhibited at the MIT Museum, MIT.nano, and the Weisner Gallery in Cambridge, MA; the Distillery Gallery in Boston, MA; and Espacio Enredo in Madrid, Spain. Her ongoing scientific research focuses on plant biodiversity and has most recently been published in academic journals including Ecology Letters, Ecological Monographs, and Ecology. She currently lives and works in Queens, New York.