Artist Adriane Colburn lived in San Francisco for over twenty years. That time was formative—personally and creatively. At the same time, she maintained a consistent presence on the East Coast. She’s from Vermont and has always spent summers there, with a lasting connection to that part of New England and its relationship to the land.
Her recent move to the East Coast full time—now living in Jersey City—coincided with several major life shifts: becoming a parent, teaching full time, and leaving the San Francisco art community where she developed her voice as an artist. Because so much changed at once, it’s difficult to pinpoint how relocation alone has shaped her work. But the influence is present. She describes a connection to place that remains specific to San Francisco—something that hasn’t fully carried over as she’s moved through different cities on the East Coast. For her, the biggest shift has been environmental. Jersey City and New York are oriented more toward material culture, while San Francisco—and Vermont—are places where the natural world plays a more immediate role. That change continues to affect both her daily life and her artistic practice. In this interview, Colburn reflects on how place, transition, and continuity shape her work.
The installation you showed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Just Below (sewer to bay) from 2005 refers to the course of water from the museum’s pipes to San Francisco Bay through the city sewer system and its Wastewater Treatment Plant. Tell us about the genesis of this project and about your approach—what sources and material/media did you use? What drew you to explore the sewer system?
Much of my work, both past and present, looks at things that are parts of our everyday lives but that are unseen due to their scale or the way that we interact with them. I am eternally interested in things that we can only see by mapping them or viewing them through technology. At the same time, embodied knowledge is an essential part of my practice. This usually means experiencing a place/issue/phenomenon physically. My research is, in part, conducted in the field- hiking, camera in hand, through local landscapes, oil fields, and industrial zones, and alongside scientists at sea and in forests.
This is an older project, but it has this thread of the unseen in it. For the piece, I used archival maps and photographs of San Francisco to pair the location of historic creeks and waterways with the network of pipes that make up the sewer system. Guided by archival materials, I walked the paths of long-gone creeks and ventured into sewage treatment plants. As the city was built, these natural water pathways were submerged and filled in with debris from fires, earthquakes and city construction. The water that used to flow above ground is largely channeled through the combined sewer system, moving through the city and out into the bay underground.
For the installation, I cut out the historic system of waterways in paper and layered it with an extracted cut-out map of the entire San Francisco sewer system. The result was a massive, fragile excavation of the system. This project is one of several that have come from research into the history of the natural ecosystem of San Francisco. Although I don’t live there anymore, I still have a strong connection to the environs and have continued to make work there. The most recent is a series of public artworks in Mission Bay that portray endemic plant and animal species and a park gateway in Rincon Hill.
In Up From Under the Edge (2009), you ventured far beyond your familiar surroundings, drawing inspiration from a swath of forest deep in the Peruvian Amazon. This work centers on photography and video captured within a section of the Amazon designated for oil exploration. Tell us more about your experience in the Peruvian Amazon. Was this shift in subject matter a new direction in your work? How does the moving image interact with the still photographs and sculptural elements in your work to create a cohesive narrative? What were the main challenges in this project?
This project was the result of a research expedition I participated in with Cape Farewell and scientists from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. The scientists were conducting research on biomass and carbon in tropical forests (among other things) and we traveled to their research sites in the cloud forests of the Andes and in the lowlands/Amazon basin. I was, and still am, deeply taken with tropical forests and am concerned with these vulnerable ecosystems that are essential climate regulators. At the same time, I was concerned with the mythology around ideas of wilderness, the legacy of depictions of the Amazon through publications such as National Geographic and the romanticized accounts of colonizers. While there I was struck by the shortcomings of photography as a descriptor that gives us the illusion of knowing a place without a direct connection.
In this piece, I took my photographs from a specific site and simplified them to the point of silhouette. I then embedded monitors in the piece through which you could view a tiny, distorted video of the place. I wanted an experience that created distance rather than an illusion of immersion, closeness, or understanding. While near the Manu River in Peru, I learned about seismic exploration for oil and the increasing gold mining activity in the area- 2 extremely destructive forces in this area that is so essential for climate health, biodiversity, and for the people there who rely on the forest for life.
I am guessing you are asking about challenges because of the intensity of the physical environment, but for me, the challenge was more about this complexity. I was only a visitor on this land, but the tension that was being played out, exploitation of the land in the service of extraction by global corporations, is eternal and a dynamic that is repeated all over the world,, and one that keeps coming up in my research. Ultimately, this piece, and my work in general, is about our disconnection with the greater natural world and the ways that we try to parse it through science and technology.
Your installation, Forest for the Trees, from 2010, seems to relate to your previous installation. Here, I see the trees morph into linear webs resembling a diagram or a silhouette of an industrial landscape. How do you see this work in relation to the previous installation in terms of concept, form, and process?
In a sense, I was exploring an opposite way of engaging with photography. In a tropical forest, biodiversity is extremely high, and there is a spectacular density of life forms. Here I created a cross-section of the forest, thinking about what lay under the ground (oil/gold), the density of the forest itself, and the infrastructure that might rise above it. The center of this piece is eight layers of hand-cut photographs and sumi ink drawings. It is dense and tangled.
For me, in this work, there is also something about vulnerability and value. These photographs come from a place that is important for all life on earth- the biodiversity that exists there, the importance of the ecosystem for the global atmosphere, a full life and survival for the people who live there, and the habitat for the astounding number of other species. And then there is the capital that can be made from a place like this through gold mining, logging, and oil drilling. I was working through this line of thinking as I made the work- they are really big global questions about how we as a species occupy the Earth, the sacrifices we make in the name of progress, and the excess. Of course, these things are more complex than what can be piled into a single artwork. This object is really quite beautiful, and it is a very simple response to something convoluted and far-reaching.
Let’s move ahead two years to your installation Spectral Reckoning (2012) at Smack Mellon Gallery. In this work, you continue to draw inspiration from tropical forests—Peru, French Guyana, and Costa Rica—exploring the tension between the natural world and its transformation into a commodified landscape. You’ve mentioned that the color and structure of the work are informed by maps, satellite, infrared, and LIDAR imaging. Could you elaborate on how you interpret these imaging technologies in your creative process? How do you see the relationship between your sculptural forms and the source material that inspires them?
This is the third artwork that I made from time spent in tropical forests. This suite of artworks, which comprised an installation, included large hand-cut paper wall-works, video, and sculpture made from reclaimed tropical hardwoods. For this project, I had the opportunity to work a bit with LIDAR data collected by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory. They had created 3d models of some of the sites I had photographed in Peru, and in fact, were coincidentally flying over me, collecting data as I was shooting video and images there.
So, I had footage from the ground, and this point cloud / 3D model of the same site, using their software, allowed me to move through digitally. I am always interested in the bits of missing information that come along with scientific data. In particular, with something like LIDAR, you might be using lasers/light to create a model of the structure of a forest or landform, but there is quite a lot of speculation that come with the process. With LIDAR, an array of lasers is projected from an airplane, and a point cloud is formed.
A 3D model is made from both an assembly of these points and the missing points and empty space. For this installation, I imagined the landscape via the data as though seen on the ground. The resulting cut paper forest is fragmented and full of holes. I also applied coded color to the work, referencing the way that elevation is portrayed in a model, or how hyperspectral data might be translated through color. This language of translating data to color in order to make it digestible is something I continue to go back to in my current work.
The same year, you presented Ways, Points, and Means, a project that drew on photographs and video collected on two expeditions into the Arctic Ocean. This environment stands in stark contrast to the tropical forest you previously explored. How did working in such a different landscape influence your approach to the installation? And what was the central concept driving this work?
My first trip to the Arctic was on a Coast Guard icebreaker in 2008 – before I had gone into the tropics- and it was such a big experience for me. This opportunity was what got me invested in spending time in the field rather than holing up alone in my studio. I was there with a group of Geologists who were making some of the first maps of the sea floor of the Arctic Ocean to support the Law of the Sea Treaty. Seeing this submerged terrain come into view in real time was fascinating, as I was surrounded by the Arctic ice sheet at a time when the sea ice was beginning to wane, but there was still quite a lot of multi-year ice left.
At the time, there was very little talk of Climate Change in the media and a real scarcity of concern in the art world, but it was front and center at sea. I saw the beginnings of a warming Arctic juxtaposed with its mapping- an act that is scientifically important but also helps to open up the Arctic for mining, oil drilling, and territorial disputes. After that trip, I returned to the sea ice with some Marine biologists and then spent some time on a research vessel in the tropics. Ways Points and Means was the third installation I made from this research.
While at sea, I got to understand the power and scale of the ocean, appreciating it both as a global commons and as a force entirely out of the scope of human control. The Ocean is not considered a “territory” unless you are close to land, and in that sense, it can rest outside of nationhood- there are few places on earth where you do not feel as if you are entering a domain of human culture, but the middle of the ocean is one of them. The abstractions of lines and maps we use to navigate the sea became the centerpiece of this installation, in poetic concert with several videos and hanging sculptures made from nautical wreckage. The installation was a rumination on being adrift in this powerful, watery commons where one feels quite small.
Your recent show, Right Angle, at RA Gallery in Great Barrington, MA, feels like a shift in your work. The exhibition text notes that you use steam-bent ash not only for its flexibility but also to shed light on a material decimated by the Emerald Ash Borer—an insect that arrived in the U.S. from Asia in shipping containers aboard wood pallets. I love how your thin ash strips curve and spiral, with some, breaking free from the wall to balance precariously on the floor, creating a dynamic dialogue with the wall-mounted pieces. Your sculptural lines carve the air, still referencing map lines. How do you see the evolution of this work in the context of your previous projects?
The shift happened shortly after I had my son. I was searching for more resilient materials that would let me show my work multiple times in a way that was less labor-intensive and simpler than the giant installations with paper. In addition, I was living in the northeast, spending more time in forests there and wanted to connect with place and materials that felt meaningful… and was of course, less able to run off to the tropics or go to sea while caring for a small kid. As I drifted towards wood and less place-based work, I began to look at the movement of global materials and how that is visualized- Joined and steam-bent wood described this beautifully. The work references publicly available data that tracks the web of vessels crossing the commons of the ocean, as raw materials and goods circulate between nations.
Right Angle at RA Gallery, 2024
The color running along the sides corresponds to standard RAL paint for used for marine vessels and shipping containers. As you mentioned, I am interested in how it sheds light on the Ash trees, which have been decimated by the Emerald Ash Borer, an insect that came to the US from Asia aboard wood pallets in shipping containers. The material is in cahoots with the work’s primary transit reference: the species and its demise are forever linked to this global circulation of goods. The sculptures are a vehicle to investigate the invisible lines that shape our lives; from the objects we hold in our hands, the industries that form the economy, to the emissions that comprise the atmosphere.
The way that I connect these bodies of work is through the idea of the hyperobject. Timothy Morton writes about these as massive “objects” such as Climate change or the oil industry, that span time and space. I think about them as also occupying a looming psychological space that surrounds us, which I relate to the ocean, global shipping, and atmosphere as well.
Although I am regularly making this work in wood, I have also begun returning to the tropics as part of field work with a group of scientists studying elevated volcanic CO2 in tropical forests in Costa Rica. So far, this new work has taken the form of drawings and video. I just returned from shooting there and am excited to see how this work will evolve.
All photos courtesy of the artist
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
About the artist: Adriane Colburn is an artist based in Jersey City, NJ and Vermont. Her work reflects a long-standing investment in materiality, extraction and the natural world; a fascination with mapping and global systems; and an early and sustained interest in Climate Disruption. Her work has been exhibited broadly including at Smack Mellon, and Parsons/New School in New York, Gallery 16 and The Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Ballroom Marfa, TX, Artsterium in the Republic of Georgia, the Eres Foundation in Munich, The Berman Museum, PA and at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Her work has been shaped by artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Blue Mountain Center, and with the Cape Farewell Project. Additionally, she has participated in numerous scientific research expeditions in regions ranging from the Arctic to Central and South America. Awards include the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Franklin Research Fellowship/ American Philosophical Institute, The Fleishhacker Foundation and Artadia Award. She is currently on the faculty at Bard College. @adrianecolburn
Related articles:
https://artspiel.org/fellow-imaginaries-carole-dinverno-and-susan-rostow-at-atlantic-gallery/
https://artspiel.org/the-tale-of-lost-waters-susan-hoffman-fishman-at-five-points-arts/
https://artspiel.org/ellen-kozak-and-scott-d-miller-river-rising-at-hunterdon-art-museum/
https://artspiel.org/diane-burko-bearing-witness-at-cristin-tierney/
https://artspiel.org/eileen-ferara-at-guttenberg-arts/
https://artspiel.org/oskar-landi-trekking-unfamiliar-environments/