2022
Mixed media
16 x 12 inches
Juniper Harrower’s research focuses on multispecies entanglements under climate change. Drawing from ecology, visual art, and the environmental humanities, she considers the ways that humans influence ecosystems while seeking reparative solutions that protect at-risk species and center environmental justice. Harrower received a PhD in plant ecology from UC Santa Cruz, an MFA in art practice from UC Berkeley. She has collaborated or exhibited with Berkeley Art Museum, the Getty, California Academy of Sciences, Santa Cruz Museum of Art, Wolf Museum, Wignall Museum, Cameron Art Museum, Museum of Art and History Lancaster and Joshua Tree National Park among other places. Her work has been recognized by the Cota-Robles Fellowship, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital, National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Harrower is an assistant professor of environmental art at Reed College.
juniperharrower.com, @juniperharrower
The Harrower Studio is a transdisciplinary art studio and ecology lab focused on the environment as a site of knowledge production. We take a new media approach to understand multispecies entanglements under climate change through our practice of sustained ecologies of care. This research-based process takes form as multimedia paintings, bioart, and fiercely playful mock-institutional interventions.
Harrower's paintings unfold in response to years of site-specific work within different communities, taking shape as soft-edge abstractions with traces of representational elements sliding into and spilling over each other. The one becomes the many, a plurality of symbiotic encounters across time. She follows these biological forms, stitching by hand to better learn the intricacies of their growth patterns and to understand potential opportunities for interspecies mending.
Material agency is an ongoing theme across our research, and we utilize both science methodologies and multimedia artistic approaches as we work to repair and vision sustainable futures. This includes projects such as developing new fungal composites for plant restoration in climate devastated environments, documenting fungal and pollinator relationships in extreme environments, and working with breast milk as an antimicrobial agent of resistance. Harrower consults with government agencies, tribal councils, and non-profits to advise on decolonial environmental practices. Her ecological and artistic research informed the protection of Joshua trees as the first species to be protected in CA due to threats mainly from climate.
We believe that ecosystem health is also fundamentally a social issue intersecting with many other social justice concerns. Drawing from the environmental humanities, contemporary art, and community ecology, we consider how power structures and systems of knowledge are involved in environmental destruction. We collaborate widely across disciplines and with communities to engage in site-specific reparative work.