Humans and nature existing in harmony

Conservation biology art exhibit hosted by Ridenbaugh Hall

University of Idaho students linked creativity and science together to create unique art at the Ridenbaugh Art Gallery exhibit this week.

Each piece took about a month or longer for the students from ISEM 301 (Postcards from the Anthropocene) and CORS 230 (Explorations in Conservation Biology) to create.

David Roon, a UI instructor who teaches the two courses, said the exhibit is a great way for students to cross the boundaries of science and art to try out new things. He said his favorite part of the exhibit was seeing all of the different media students experimented with, including paints, tissue paper, saran wrap, plastic water bottles and aluminum cans.

“Oftentimes the science and biology fields are too mathematical and quantitative for the general public to get excited about, but art has the ability to tell complicated stories in easier, more visual ways,” Roon said. “There are some really big problems to solve, but we can solve them and at least bring attention to them.”

While a few of the students were studio artists, there were a variety of engineering, marketing, music and science majors who participated.

The “main goal of the works was to bear witness and cry out against the damage done by a rapacious humanity,” Roon wrote in the introduction to the artist booklets scattered around the exhibit.

Some students worked in groups to combine their ideas and skills, such as Lydia Druin, Desire Arizmendez and Cade Smith, who made the piece “Conservation over Coffee.”

Using two of Druin’s recycled coffee cups from One World Cafe, they painted the outside of the cups with coffee and natural pigments such as grass, spinach and an orange. One cup showed sun grown coffee plants leaving a barren, colorless landscape picked over by a machine, and the other showed shade grown coffee plants that grow in a natural, forest ecosystem.

“I personally am not a coffee drinker, but I learned a lot from our research,” Arizmendez said. “I didn’t know a lot about the concerns of growing coffee, but I realized that shade grown coffee plants are more environmentally friendly because a lot less pesticides and fertilizers are used and the beans are hand-picked.”

Arizmendez said although they used three different types of coffee, all of them took many layers to create darker shades of brown. The overall project was fun, relaxed and environmentally friendly, Arizmendez said.

The group’s artist statement read “Coffee and the land can live in harmony, creating a thriving and bright environment. The plants and animals stained into these cups are native to the places that coffee is grown, so we tried to capture their essence as a part of the environment rather than a removable entity.”

“Not all of this exhibit focuses on negative human impacts on the environment, it is also an opportunity to learn about positive environmental stories and see students’ works,” Roon said.

Allison Spain can be reached at [email protected]

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