Bog Etudes

Form+Content Gallery, Minneapolis January - February 2023

Bog Etudes strives to preserve the peat bogs of Northern Minnesota by singing their unsung stories. These beautiful, biodiverse landscapes comprise10% of Minnesota geography and provide essential habitat for myriad plants and animals. Peatlands are also climate heroes, storing 30% of the earth’s soil carbon while covering only 3%of the earth’s surface. Bateman explores the natural pigments of earth, plants, land, and water through silk and wax. Her assemblages are stained with the natural sediments, tannins and iron found in waterways to portray abstractions of time, history, mud, life cycles, and the intersection between the toxicity inflected on the earth and the eternal work of mothering and nurturing. Minnesota is home to 90,000 miles of shoreline around its plentiful lakes, wetlands, peatlands, rivers, and streams. Minnesota’s wet-lands and waterways are Bateman’s primary collaborators. To honor these sacred partnerships, she must embrace the primal, biological, durational, and uncontrollable aspects of making. She must trust instinct when leaving silk to soak for weeks, months, or years in rivers, lakes, and bogs, allowing the secrets of these places to stain the silk. Bateman explores ideas of cloth and memory, asserting that silk becomes imbued with the life of the bog or lake and can hold that memory within its fibers. Her work is a celebration of this beautiful place known by its original Dakota peoples as Mni Sota Makoce, the “land where the water reflects the clouds.” Ultimately, Bateman hopes for her work to tell part of the complex story of these wild places that hold much of the bio-diversity remaining on earth. Protecting and preserving this biodiversity is an essential component to facing climate change and keeping earth hospitable to life.