Symbiotic Cooperation: Concept/OK Residency Artist Sarah Hearn by Allison C. Meier
For her Concept/OK Residency project, Oklahoma City artist Sarah Hearn is collecting lichen samples to be documented and identified, to become a part of the final exhibition.
Sarah Hearn is one of two artists selected for the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition’s (OVAC) Concept/OK Residency project, a new exhibition investigating current art making in Oklahoma. Hearn will be exhibiting her project Symbiotic Cooperation this December at the inaugural exhibit at the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa Hardesty Arts Center (AHHA). The Oklahoma City-based artist’s project focuses on organisms that she finds especially fascinating: lichens. “They are like alien life on our planet— invisible yet everywhere,” she said. “They expose instability between science and science fiction an area ripe for study, creative and scholarly.” Symbiotic Cooperation developed from Hearn’s curiosity for natural systems that appear concise and organized on the surface, but on closer look are more complicated. The lichen, as a combination of two organisms living together, is especially unusual in defying clear classification. “I guess I’m drawn to this rebellious behavior,” she said. “Lichens are considered fungi, but they aren’t fungi alone. Because of their symbiotic relationship with alga or cyanobacteria, they can exist in some of the most extreme climates on earth and they
4
p ro f i l e
grow on everything. My house, for example, has at least four different kinds of lichen growing on it.” From now through the closing of the exhibit in February 2013, Hearn is having an open call for lichens around the world. Everyone is invited to collect and mail her lichen, which Hearn will then photograph, draw and incorporate into the exhibit. Each participant will receive a photograph from Hearn of his or her lichen. To further involve the public, she will be hosting a lichen collecting expedition near Tulsa at the start of the exhibit, and she will also conduct a workshop exploring the relationships between lichen and photography. “It is a type of mutual exchange intended to mimic the symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria,” she said. For Symbiotic Cooperation, she is working with professional lichenologist Sheila Strawn, PhD, to identify the specimens she receives and preserve them for future study. After the project is complete, the University of Central Oklahoma will accept the lichen collection into their herbarium. Already her collection has a diversity of lichens, including unwhiskered ruffle lichen, bear lichen, dwarf
rosette lichen, reindeer-moss lichen and wolf lichen, as well as lots of bark lichens as yet unidentified. As they are understudied organisms, an organized collection of lichens could be an asset for future study, especially since it’s estimated that lichens can live to over 1,000 years old. While Symbiotic Cooperation is a divergence from her previous work in several ways, including the use of a material in a living state and the reliance on collaboration, it is connected to her previous art projects as well. “This project addresses my desire to explore the complex human relationship with other forms of biological life,” she said. “This is a definite continuation from an Unnatural History, a previous project that documents the fictional discovery of a taxonomy of marine life.” Both Symbiotic Cooperation and Unnatural History originated with Hearn borrowing empirical methods of inquiry and applying them to her art, evident through her use of classification systems, photographic documentation and scientific illustration. Each body of work she produces also serves as a reminder to constantly redefine, reinterpret and reconfigure what we think we know about the world around us. However,