I am Lindsay Hansen. I'm an artist, adventurer, and environmentalist, and studied Ecosystem Ecology and Art Practice at UC Berkeley. I actively pursue a life outdoors, filled with activity. I paint giant abstract landscapes, scientific illustrations, and studies of rock formations and stratigraphies when I'm in the backcountry. I am intrigued by the connection of science and art, and how they can inform each other to improve human connections with the world. My ecological research interests include watershed restoration, climate change dynamics and resilience, water quality, urban encroachment, and wildlife ecology. I love to practice yoga, free dive, play guitar, swim, hike, backpack, and create art.
In my art, I am interested in human interactions with ecosystems; people are often seen as either completely removed from the natural landscape, or indubitably a part of it – there is no middle ground. In my paintings, I am exercising an exploration of the interaction of humans with the natural world of the Earth. By tearing apart, rearranging, reimagining, and reconstructing landscapes, I am applying a human hand, a human alteration, to each landscape that indisputably changes the character and nature of that space. Each painting is an attempt to understand how much alteration the landscapes, ecosystems, and natural spaces on Earth can withstand before they are no longer recognizable as Earth.
From my background in biology and ecology research, I have been instilled with an awe for biodiversity. Through a combination of my landscape-inspired art works and an ongoing study based in scientific illustration and ecosystem appropriation, my species account works intend to inspire excitement and wonderment for biology, science, and connections with nature from varying cultural viewpoints. With a focus in morphological accuracy, but with inspiration from discrepancies, differences, and mutations within nature, these works celebrate the knowledge that humans are not the only creatures inhabiting and influencing the Earth.
My palette is informed by scientific explorations of mine and others: colors of alpine forests, lakes, wetlands, and deserts, as well as the human body and its wastes. While I use a diversity of materials in my works, I try to focus on materials that are inherently similar between humans and other living things: oils, wood, natural fibers, biological tissues. Experimentation with tension, complexity, confusion and muddling in the set up of the paint is vital in order to reflect on the confusing and complicated self-administered separation of humans with nature. Conflict between types of forms, in botched stratigraphy lines, non sequitur horizons, and fragmented figures in my works are a search for this long-lost relationship between our planet and us.
It is my hope that these works of art instill an awe and connection with nature like that of the scientific explorers: a perception of location, a longing for knowledge, and the questioning of humanity’s place and role: imaginary vs. reality, built vs. natural, human vs. organic, art vs. science.
