Announcing Artist-in-Residence: Nina Elder
Waterfall Arts is honored to host Nina Elder for a residency in July 2021, entitled The Fray. Learn more about the project below — and stay tuned for upcoming opportunities to engage with Nina around this work. This residency is coordinated in tandem with our featured summer exhibition: Photographing Belfast’s Waterfront: Then & Now.
The Fray
The Fray explores the balance between reliance and resilience, repair and rejuvenation. During this residency, artist and researcher Nina Elder will engage coastal communities in one-on-one conversations, focusing on cycles of breaking and mending, trusting and healing.
In a studio at Waterfall Arts throughout the month of July, Nina plans to produce works of prose and poetry alongside a series of drawings that depict knotted ropes, mended anchor lines, and fraying nets. Nina’s art revels in the complexities of dependency and brokenness, and serves as a metaphor of living through climate devastation and social upheaval. It questions what tethers humanity during periods of extreme change, and how we might exist with what remains.
Uplift
“Uplift,” a multi-media exploration of the act of lifting by artist Nina Elder, opens at Waterfall Arts on Friday December 10 (National Human Rights Day). Through a residency at Waterfall Arts (with support from The Onion Foundation) during the summer of 2021, artist Nina Elder created eight large-scale drawings. Her inspiration began as she witnessed the care, collaboration, technology, and resources that are used to move yachts from water to land in Belfast harbor.
As a counterbalance to the exclusivity she observed in the conspicuous care of yachts, Nina made these drawings while considering what else is carried in more private realms. Created using marine motor lubricant and industrial pulp mill waste—materials that point to certain non-recreational realities in Maine—these drawings abstract what is uplifted and are meditations on the kinds of invisible emotional lifting we all do.
The attention to the technologies of cradling and carrying boats in the harbor subsequently led Nina to create “Overburden,” a video installation that is debuting as part of this exhibition.
overburden: (verb) to give someone a weight that is too great to carry.
overburden: (noun) the geologic material that is removed to expose a desired underground mineral
From 1902-1987 the Dodge Phelps Corporation dumped massive piles of slag along the United States/Mexico border in Douglas, Arizona. This final product of copper mining is a toxic landscape defined by radioactivity, unfertile soil, and acidified rain and rivers. It is a dramatic and dangerous place that has become a theater for United States politics as enacted by border patrol employees, walls, and myriad forms of surveillance and incarceration technologies.
“Overburden” documents artist Nina Elder’s attempt to care for and carry away the slag. She uses hand-sewn devices, accentuating both her strength and her softness, to uplift and dignify the pulverized, leached, melted, dumped, and forgotten rocks.
Amy Tingle, program director at Waterfall Arts, says, “Nina’s work is a direct response to the extraordinary weight in our current world—so many of us feel overwhelmed, overtired, nearly incapacitated by the burdens of the pandemic and the sytemic issues it has unearthed. Nina created from a space of true heartache as she witnessed firsthand the destruction of land caused by greed and cruelty, yet she still managed to ask and attempt to answer the question: ‘what if recognizing internal resiliency and healthy interdependence becomes the hallmark of this challenging time?’ These questions are crucial: Can we help someone else carry a weight that is dragging them down? Can we find beauty in the hoisting, joy in levitation, can we be awed by the miracle of understanding that not one single organism on this entire planet is doing it alone?
Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long term community-based projects, and public art. Find out more about Nina and her work at http://ninaelder.com
About Nina Elder
Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on and interruption of the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long term community-based projects, and public art.
This residency is partly funded by a Discovery Grant from the Onion Foundation.
