Why I Landscape

I grew up on a small farm in Maryland. My parents were naturalists who also ran a landscaping company. They controlled nature for clients, while keeping the woods surrounding our own home as native and wild as possible. So I inherited a funny relationship with honoring and taming nature. In college I fell in love with landscape painting, hefting all my paint supplies outside and standing there for hours trying to catch the color, space, and light, just so. But after graduate school I gave it up to draw instead. Drawing allowed me to celebrate the light even more. I still loved color, but it complicated the immediacy of things, and I wanted to construct my own worlds instead of depicting what was already there. The drawings became very large imagined landscapes, pulled from many different images and sources. Around this time I also began researching psychology and what emotions communicate, and that’s filtered into the landscapes too.

Beauty and the visual rhythms of nature have always enamored me, but I struggle with the kind of beauty that is artificial to the point that it needs a lot of intervention to look good, or that can only look good when groomed one particular way. I like things to be a little wild, growing how they want to and stopping only when they’re happy to stop. It reminds me that people are probably happiest that way too.

After several years of teaching University students to draw I moved to Austin, TX and bought a house with a bare yard and a few ill-placed trees. A local landscaping company designed a yard plan, and while it didn’t hit the mark it broadened my imagination of what the space could be. I’ve always wanted to know more about permaculture, native plantings, and Dutch dream meadows, a particular planting style that looks like a meadow but even more aesthetically pleasing. I spent the next year researching gardens and learning about native plants and trees. I constructed a native yard in the particular palette I wanted, which grew easily within the weather conditions and city restraints, and it only gets dreamier as time goes on and the trees grow taller.

Just prior to this, I visited the Netherlands to research a Dutch garden for a new series of drawings, and relocated to Amsterdam two years later to continue that research. The Netherlands is one of the only countries whose land mass is expanding, as they are constantly building artificial sand bars in the sea to make more space, which means Amsterdam is essentially a city built on sand. Given this challenge, it’s quite interesting how the Dutch integrate nature into urban planning. They turn to plants to solve structural problems like stopping the sand from washing away while simultaneously creating a cozy natural environment within a bustling urban center. Being a largely dark and rainy place, nature is also used to offset depression from the lack of sun, and it’s easy to access here.

I have two children who are still quite small. An unexpected effect of motherhood is that my capacity for chaos has increased so much that my work can now handle more uncertainty too. While my creative output is bound by time and attention, this period has brought me a tremendous influx of ideas. My mind works more like a prism now; I imagine spaces dimensionally in a way I couldn’t before, and it’s expanding the visions I have for my work and their scale. I tap into the ways nature and people have always collaborated, throughout history, in imagined futures, by gender, and through the commoditization of beauty. These ideas include constructed environments, real or drawn, reimagined to coexist in spaces that people use. And now my work is to bring these ideas to life.

-Rachel

Additional works by RWS can be found via

Instagram @wolfsonsmith

Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, TX

& book recommendations, here

Video and original score by Richard Carpenter