While the fusion of arts, music, and creative methods is fused within my research and teaching, I find quite intense fascination with bringing these methods and artistic practices in conversation with the sciences, especially tree ring sciences, climate sciences, and botanical sciences. Some of the artistic and musical methods I use are the following:
- Printmaking
- Textiles and Quilting
- Embroidery
- Jazz Composition
- Botanical Illustration
- Ceramics
Below are some of those projects!
Transcalar Triptych with Ellen Bergan
Working with one of my most dear colleagues and friend, Ellen and I worked to re-enliven Pleistocene wood that is over 50,000 years old through textiles and printmaking. Truly my favorite collaboration and art-science fusion that I’ve had the chance to co-create. Read more in NiCHE and Antennae Issue 64!
PhD Dissertation Cover
The cover of my dissertation titled “The Missing Ring: Tree Ring Scholar-Activism, Creative Justice-Based Pedagogies, & Community-Centered Geographies in the Climate Crisis.” This piece juxtaposes my ongoing, internal conflict of navigating academic spaces will staying true to my environmental justice and activism roots. On the left is a scan of my fingerprint from being arrested at a non-violent sit-in and the left is a print of a block of wood depicting it’s many decades of lived experiences in the tree’s rings.
Tree Ring Printmaking
While I have mainly used tree ring printmaking as an education tool, the power of printmaking to make visual the intensities of landscape change I find absolutely mesmerizing. Above is a print from a tree that shows a thin white line about halfway through the tree’s life that is the year that white settlers colonized a part of Mississippi and drastically changed the Indigenous fire regime.
Jazz Composition from NOAA Climate Data
The following tune utilized the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) dataset of global average temperatures back to 1880’s, separated and averaged by decade, and based the chord and melodic progression off of the decadal averages in the changing and increasing global temperatures. Additionally, the shifts in melodic and harmonic structure were also inspired by the influences of Black jazz musicians such as Oscar Pettiford, Milt Jackson, Melba Liston, and Oscar Peterson especially during the 1950’s and 1960’s which coincided with sharp and steady increases in global temperatures. When soloing, musicians are asked to think about the question: “What is at stake with climate change?” and “How has and will climate change affect the creation of music?”
Climate Quilt
Stemming from a class assignment, I have now accumulated over 30 handmade quilt squares that harkens back to the AIDs Memorial Quilt and challenges students, community members, and beyond to try and depict what is lost with global climate change.
Master’s Dissertation Cover
For the cover of my master’s dissertation titled “Plant Extinction in the Anthropocene: Emotional Political Ecologies of American Chestnut’s Disappearance in Central Appalachia”, I illustrated all the plants that the Appalachians I worked with along with my own plant identification of the plant life that surrounded the American Chestnut’s extinction in the region and felt, absorbed, and adapted to this disruptive change in the ecologies of mountains.
Nick Koenig 