The Fuller Projects launched the latest in its line of weekly exhibits this Friday with a focus on natural beauty through the eyes of a variety of student artists.
“Meandering Landscape” is a collection of sketches, paintings and more done by students in Martha MacLeish’s fall semester class, S200: Perceiving Beauty through Attentiveness: Drawing at IU’s Research & Teaching Preserve. The exhibit operates in conjunction with Sustain IU Week.
“It’s a preserve that’s heavily used by the sciences,” MacLeish said. “They have a lab there that has classroom space, bathrooms, everything you would need to be away for class. It’s not really used that much by artists, so I decided it’d be the perfect place to get away and teach a class.”
MacLeish, an associate professor in the Department of Studio Art, said the goal was to create an arts-based class that also related to the environment and that students even in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the various arts, and even the sciences could enjoy and learn from in an inter-disciplinary way.
Students in the class went out to the preserve, which is located in proximity to the Griffy Nature Preserve, for six hours each Friday last semester. The students were encouraged to completely immerse themselves for the time they were out in the woods, focusing on the natural elements surrounding them.
“Thankfully, we had a really good group of people, because it is a six-hour day and it can get long sometimes, but people were up for it,” MacLeish said.
Sarah Chaplin, a senior and an exhibiting artist for this show, said her mostly landscape-based works were largely informed by her surroundings at the reserve.
" It was the dream,” Chaplin said. “We kind of got to do our own interpretations of landscapes and we were flexible with different mediums. Some people worked with charcoal, others worked in wet mediums like ink wash or watercolor.”
The works ended up being diverse both in the subject matter and medium, MacLeish said.
“We were looking at it critique by critique, but when we hung it here that was one of the things that stood out to me, the idea that it was so many different approaches,” MacLeish said. “When we would be away from the site and people would do off-site idea projects. People would really relate it to their own experiences with the environment that even went back to childhood.”
The memories students drew upon ranged from the yard where they grew up to musings on a garden in grandmother’s house, and MacLeish said that stood out to her as the saw the works together in one space. The show was made extra special because of these personal connections.
Chaplin said what stood out to her was the diversity that exists within nature, which she enjoys depicting in her work.
“There’s so much to look at, it’s so complex and specific and beautiful and everywhere,” Chaplin said. “Especially living on this campus, it’s just so beautiful it’s hard not to focus on it.”
One of the goals of the class was a greater attention to the world around, and that was what MacLeish said she hopes students gained a greater appreciation for.
“There’s something about going out to a place for a prolonged period of time, not having any distractions and just not knowing what you’re going to find, because every day we’d go there, the weather would be slightly different, the season would be slightly different,” MacLeish said.
Chaplin said this attentiveness was exactly what she took away after taking the class with MacLeish.
“I probably learned a specific way of looking and how to look longer and harder,” Chaplin said. “When you sit down, what you think is going to be interesting doesn’t usually end up being what’s the most interesting because you have to sit there and be in the environment for a longer period of time.”
