Spring-Summer 2007

Photos of prairie fire and monarch butterfly by LeAnn Spencer and Steve Duke

The Prairie Through an Artist’s Lens

Victoria McOmie

Copyright © 2007 Victoria McOmie. All rights reserved.

I went to Kansas last summer to continue my exploration of the tallgrass prairie that started with an artist in residency a few years ago at the Ragdale Foundation, located on a small parcel of original tallgrass prairie near Chicago.

The photographs presented here are actually scrolls I made for an open studio I held recently of an installation featuring sculpture and photographs based on the prairie. The blank green spaces in the photographs mean a couple of different things to me. One is that there lies in that blank space a temptation to "do something" to the space as an artist. Which is what happened to the prairie in a way. We did something to it, that's for sure. And since most of the time I wish the prairie had been left alone I left the green spaces alone. And so the green represents a meditative quiet space and at the same time focuses my eyes into a kind of infinity. I want to see that kind of infinitely expanding prairie but only in Kansas have I been close to having that experience. Since they are scrolls they hang like an Asian scroll (from dowels, no glass), and can move about in the breeze which is important since the wind’s presence on the prairie is so vital.