EXHIBITED WORK
Art + The Environment
August - September 2024
Photos coming soon!
This exhibition with Protect PT featured eleven pieces made with mixed materials that combine organic forms, folk symbolism, and sculpture. Many of the works depict reinterpretations of Pennsylvania Dutch folk recipes and motifs, which were developed by German colonists who used the materials around them to symbolize their lives and challenges as they adjusted to rural life in new Pennsylvania. Sierra draws inspiration from their simple patterns with complex representations, using locally found materials to invoke the contemporary environment of diverse flora, fauna, fungi, and waste. When materials that represent deep time and cultural ties such as coal and rust are allowed to share space with native species and industrial refuse, our collective past and present is acknowledged and can act as a foundation to spring forward into a just world with clean air and clean water for all.
Natural Pigments
Art Exhibition
Collected over the course of two years in Allegheny and Clarion Counties, Iron Laden is full of iron-rich natural pigments and their industrial-waste counterparts. Paint and ink have been carefully crafted from hematite, pink ochre, black walnuts, copper and iron acetate, oak galls, Acid Mine Drainage, and biogenic ochre from the Clarion River (iron oxide produced by microbes). Southwestern Pennsylvania’s origins of pristine waterways, native wildflowers and green mountains have been forever changed by the fossil fuel industry and human disturbance, leaving behind an intriguing coexistence of waste and wonder.
Clarion Conservation District + Clarion County Arts Council
Michelle’s Cafe in Clarion, PA
August 2024
More photos coming soon. I’m working on it!!!
June - October 2023
Naturalize represents the complex relationships between wild and waste in southwestern Pennsylvania by allowing materials to share space as they do in the city, taking the form of a ‘land biography’. On plywood diverted from the waste-stream, linseed and safflower oil encapsulate rust, goldenrod, Japanese knotweed, food scraps, creek ochres, robin’s eggshells, fungi, wood ash, brick, slag, clay, and other native/feral beings that connect across deep time and industrialization. Each material is a window into the molecular minutiae of Pittsburgh, providing fantastical fuel for imagining a future of reciprocity and belonging.
This work includes prints of two Stigmoderini dorsal habiti in addition to a sculpture representing the measured absorbance and reflectance spectra of the photographed beetles. The specimens are from the Bellamy collection of Buprestidae housed at the California State Collection of Arthropods and the images and spectra were taken at the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum.
The sculpture was made with acrylic and dichroic film (reflectance, structural color), handmade mulberry silk paper dyed with cochineal scale insects (absorbance, pigmentary color), and connected by local shellac-finished wood riddled with beetle galleries.
Both structural and pigmentary color can be found abundantly in insects, yet the functions and chemical compositions of these colors are supremely understudied. Iridescence is an incredible display of a colored micro-structural phenomenon, but pigment molecules themselves are color-producing chemicals. Not only are wild pigments evolutionarily significant, but the way they are expressed can elicit a range of emotional and behavioral responses whether you are a beetle, fish, or human being. My goal for these pieces was to display pigments as an exciting tool to educate the general public about color science and raise appreciation for the small, complex molecules that have such important impacts on our living world.
For more information about the research behind these works don't hesitate to contact me at sierraweirart@gmail.com.
Louisiana Art & Science Museum
July 2021 - July 2022
