Anne Yoncha arrived in Missoula as a painter. When she got to the University of Montana to start her MFA in visual art, the immediate landscape triggered questions that eventually led her to a Fulbright in Finland, working with scientists and other artists to make interactive, data-based projects.
Think of a Finnish rug, decorated with drawings based on microbes collected high up in Scandinavian skies. Or a choir singing tones based on data collected from its peatland.
If you go
Anne Yoncha’s exhibition “Second Nature” is on view at the University Center Gallery at the University of Montana through Nov. 15.
“Art science. That’s what I call what I do. I also call it ‘bio art,’” she said in a lecture this week. “I hope that by translating the physiology of some of our plant neighbors, and also some of what’s happening ecologically, into a gallery space or into sound or something we can experience in a sensory way, we can connect with these other species or non-human neighbors a little bit more deeply.”
Yoncha is now an assistant professor of art and the painting area coordinator at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
She returned to Missoula last week for an art exhibition and to give the second annual Elers Koch lecture. The series was started in honor of the late forester, conservationist and writer by his family. His son Peter Koch is a master printer and renowned figure in the world of art books who’s based out of Berkeley, California, after spending the early part of his career in Montana.
Alan Townsend, the dean of the UM College of Forestry and Conservation, said the lecture is an effort to “combine art and writing and conservation in the wild and really think about that fusion.”
In her talk at the ZACC last Monday, Yoncha said the “aha! moment” that led her on this path occurred after she got to Montana. A Delaware native who spent most of her life back East, she was curious when she saw that the Missoula valley’s hills and mountains were thick with trees on some sides, while others were sparse.
“We would never get a landscape like this unless we had chopped down all of the other trees. And so I started my time here with this question of, ‘How does this happen?’” she said.
That led to a class with environmental studies professor Dan Spencer and more questions about the natural world.
While here, she made a temporary, interactive data-based piece at Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild in Lincoln. For her thesis, she concocted an installation that drew on live data from a ponderosa pine that powered fans in the Gallery of Visual Arts, stirring motion in large-scale paintings on vellum.
After graduating in 2019, she set out for Europe as a Fulbright in art-science research at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, located in the city of Oulu.
“I knew how Finnish people survived this kind of extreme climate, but I was really interested in how the plants did,” she said.
More specifically, sphagnum moss, which is the plant that creates peatland. While the top of a peatland is green, she said, that’s the only part that’s growing. Farther down, the plant intertwines and meshes with itself and its neighbors to create an artificial water table, one so waterlogged that no oxygen is available for microorganisms.
“This plant has engineered an ecosystem where mostly only it can thrive,” she said. “And that reminded me of us.”
It also stores up pollen and carbon, making it rich with geologic data and also an efficient energy source that Finland is tapping into to become more energy independent.
Unfortunately, once extracted, what’s left is a “scarred landscape, a wet, acidic desert,” and the peatland can’t regenerate itself within several lifetimes.
She had a lot of plants she’d gathered on site, and Oulu has a large paper-making industry, so she decided to make paper herself the old-fashioned way — boiling and flattening by hand. In the end she had sheets of paper. Then she gridded out and mapped the peat extraction site and embroidered back in tracts of land.
“It started to feel like this labor was somehow an analogue for the sphagnum mosses’ slow labor building up peatland about a millimeter a year,” she said.
Working with composer Daniel Townsend, she created an audio-visual work called “Peat Quilt.” The finished piece, with 36 panels joined by springs, is hanging in the wall of the UC Gallery. There’s a pedal on the floor and a button on the wall that you can press to cue up a custom speaker system. The audio is based on soil sample data, shot with a specialized camera, that Townsend created.
“You can hear the sounds of the soil through the materials of what now lives there after we removed the peat,” she said.
She wanted to do something more with sound and the data she was able to extract with a specialized camera. She wanted human voices to sing it, too, an “investment of our breath” into a living landscape.
She collaborated with Hannah Selin, a New York composer, who could translate Yoncha’s data into a graphic score. “Suon Laula (Song of the Swamp)” was premiered by the Tuira Chamber Choir in Oulu in early October.
Selin also used Finnish text in the piece, along with a translation, that you can listen to and read in the UC Gallery.
While in Finland, she was accepted for another residency called Field Notes at the Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland. She was working with a High-Altitude Bioprospecting group, which included a variety of specialists such as artists, scientists and programmers.
They flew a heli-kite balloon outfitted with a 360-degree camera and microphones to gather microbes suspended in the air at high altitude. They found one microbe that was first identified in Antarctica, for instance.
For one piece on view here, she worked with team members Heidi Pietarinen (a Finnish textile artist), Noora Sandgren (a Finnish photographer) and Melissa Grant (a U.K. biochemist).
Back in their home countries during the 2021 lockdown phase, they “started thinking about how the form of some of these microbes was very floral,” she said. It called to mind a lushly detailed Flemish still life that was preoccupied with death and decay.
They created drawings that were digitally stitched together and brainstormed a way to translate them back to an analogue form.
They turned to Finnish weaver Vesa Annala, who produced their drawings with a Jacquard Loom, “argued by some people to be the first computer because it uses a punch card,” Yoncha said.
The final weaving is over 26 feet long and about 4.5 feet wide, cascading from the wall down to the gallery floor. They titled it “Kangas.”
“‘Kangas’ is the Finnish word for ‘forest type’ and for ‘fabric’ because Finnish people, they have this conception of the forest that’s interwoven with many different things, like fabric is,” she said.
Source: Missoulian