My work ranges from drawing to installation, using plants and fungi to make pigments and sculptural materials. While I also harvest my own materials from debris in gardens I tend and collect from kitchen scraps, I primarily focus on the use of invasive species which I gather independently. These species negatively impact native biodiversity and my goal is to bring attention to the importance of California native species conservation. My work is meant to visually reflect the properties of the native environments that these invasive species are threatening, referencing familiar patterns and textures found in these locations. In using natural pigments and materials, the value we place on permanence is reversed as the ingredients in my work continue to assert their own presence and change in their appearance, color, and durability by nature of their biodegradability.
My practice operates on a continuum as I gather what emerges according to the seasons, and make work evocative of the physical patterns, textures, growth habits, and visual behaviors I encounter in the native landscape. My drawings don’t solely exist to exhibit the materials I use, but seek to beg the question: How much might we be overlooking when we think we understand the lifeforms outside of us? And how does the human desire for permanence impact the external and internal health of ourselves and of the native environments we live in?
About
Since receiving her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2016, Elissa Callen has worked in horticulture and researched CA native plants, ornamental horticultural plants, fungi, and mineral pigments in order to informatively give back to her art practice of using natural material as color or medium. She grows and nurtures her own color in her garden and collects it in both the native landscape and urban areas. After collecting, the natural materials she uses are processed into ink, pigment, paper, or other form and then used as the staple material of her work. She currently lives in Oakland and works as an artist, educator, fine gardener, and landscape designer. See some of her work as a horticulturist here.