earth imprints earth walkers hyperlandscapes
land/sea/sky/humxn
fieldnotes of a transitioning earth This Sacred Withering
illustrative photography and design wavelines and keepers of time
ephemeral and organic sculpture, material, and performance investigations
systems design and science communication
bio
Renn Simmons is an Ecological Translator and Researcher who uses the channels of site specific fieldwork, Ecology, decolonial praxis, Sacred Ecology, experiential organic photographic processes and techniques, bio-material exploration, science communication, Ephemeral Sculpture, and other various forms of creative and ecological research to center and collaborate with the More-Than-Humxn-World. Her research and artistic practice seeks to dismantle the mythologies around settler-colonial and white supremacist notions of wilderness, while exploring ecological violence, climate change, environmental racism, species and biodiversity loss, Solastalgia, fortress and militarized forms of conservation, and forest and coastal ecosystems and science.
As an artist who identifies with experiencing a neuromuscular disease and a broad history of emotional illness, the foundation of her work rests upon a lived intimacy with pain, despair, and looking to the More-Than-Humxn-World for healing, solace, spiritual guidance, and community. While Renn’s work doesn’t overtly seek to express these lived experiences, the various modalities of her work live within the parameters of a life saved by and for the Earth.
Her work seeks to invite viewers to simultaneously find respite, solace, community, and new language for expressing the complex experiences held within our relationship to the Earth, ourselves, and one another, while challenging, exploiting, and expanding upon traditional photographic, sculptural, and multidisciplinary aesthetics and methods of making that exist within the western ecological art canon.
By using and looking to a broad scope of methods, research, and ecological field work, her work seeks to radically investigate the global north’s relationship to the Earth while simultaneously drawing from a core belief that all of Life is interwoven, thereby calling into question any experiences, governmental policies, research, science, histories, or actions that might seek to erase this core ethos.