Erin Wiersma | Land Institute Prairie Festival

Artist Erin Wiersma was to be a featured guest speaker at this year’s now-canceled Prairie Festival. See her work at the Salina Art Center in Salina, Kansas, just north of The Land Institute headquarters.

Portrait of Erin Wiersma, 2019. Photo by Aaron Paden. ©Erin Wiersma

About the Exhibit:

“Wiersma’s artistic practice focuses on the body’s capacity to absorb and respond to an environment. The Konza Prairie works on paper are created on location in one of the few remaining protected grasslands in the world. She creates a record of the land, using both bio-char produced from controlled burns and the embossing from the forbs, fauna and rocky terrain as they incise and transforms the paper surface echoing the topography. Pulling, rubbing, dragging, pushing, and lifting — changed by the elements; wind, temperature, humidity, and landscape itself. She creates with the prairie; it influences her actions into large-scale works, resulting from the varying burn treatments, fire intensities, and vegetative composition from each locale.”