Environmental artist Leslie Sobel has done some extreme things for her art while embedded at scientific outposts around the world.
The Michigan-native slept on an ice sheet while camping in the Yukon Territory with a group of glaciologists.
Most recently, she sailed on the Tall Ship Antigua around Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.
From her perspective, a bed in a more than century-old cabin in northern Michigan in June at one of the nation’s largest and longest continuously operating field research stations “sounds luxurious.”
The University of Michigan Biological Station selected the painter and printmaker as an artist in residence from June 4 through July 2 at the more than 10,000-acre research and teaching campus along Douglas Lake just south of the Mackinac Bridge in Pellston.
Sobel connects climate, water and data through art.
“I’m honored and excited to focus on our home state and Michigan’s ecosystems,” Sobel said. “It’s give-and-take during artist residencies in remote field stations. I learn so much from scientists about how the natural world works — how things are interconnected. I’m going into the immersive experience with serendipity. We’ll see how things visually and intellectually connect.”
The U-M Biological Station’s Artist in Residency Program, which began in 2018, is designed to introduce new artists to the region and give them the opportunity to interact with the robust scientific community on campus.
“We think by allying with artists and ingraining them in our field station, together we can inspire deeper understanding and appreciation of local ecosystems and improve public engagement to support conservation,” said Dr. Aimée Classen, director of the U-M Biological Station and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutional Biology. “We look forward to learning from Leslie about creative ways to better communicate our research and the story of this incredible place, and we hope our research findings inform her new works.”
Students, faculty and researchers from around the globe have studied and monitored the impact of environmental changes on northern Michigan ecosystems for 114 years.
Since the historic field station began in 1909, an estimated 10,500 students have passed through to engage in scientific discovery needed to understand and sustain ecosystems from local to global scales.
“Climate change is an existential threat to everything about human life,” Sobel said. “Together, artists and scientists can make the information accessible to everyone. It’s critical to give people diverse ways to understand what is happening. If data were enough, we’d have solved the problem 40 years ago. We aren’t changing people’s behavior with statistics and data. We change behavior though emotion. I am visually driven in my mission.”
The daughter of two scientists, Sobel, who lives in Ann Arbor, uses her mixed-media work to focus on climate change, water and the public’s disconnect from the natural world.
She integrates wilderness fieldwork in remote places with scientists — such as toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie and melting glaciers in the Arctic Circle — and time alone in the studio. She has incorporated satellite imaging and microscopic images of water samples into her paintings.
Last fall while she was an artist in residence on a tall ship for a 17-day cruise, the first stop was at Hornsund, a fjord that was once completely covered in one glacier north of Norway but has retreated to now be eight separate “faces.”
“It’s shocking how much melt is happening,” Sobel said.
After she went home to Ann Arbor and her studio, she made a massive painting that features lines gathered from satellite imaging and scientific papers showing where glaciers were at different times.
“It’s not a scientific illustration,” Sobel said. “It’s more emotive and flowy and painterly, incorporating data.”
In summer 2019 she traveled to Maumee Bay State Park in Ohio along Lake Erie to see the large algal bloom that shut down the beach for swimmers. Exposure was a public health risk.
“We’ve all seen algae in ponds, but you don’t expect to see that in the Great Lakes,” Sobel said. “There were tendrils of algae and signs saying don’t get in the water, it’s toxic.”
Even more troublesome for Sobel was the human behavior she witnessed at the Maumee Bay State Park Golf Course.
“With all the signs up and the beach closed, they were still spraying the golf course with gigantic tanks of fertilizer and pesticide, and that’s what causes and feeds the blooms,” Sorel said. “It was such a disconnect.”
She created prints from the algae — blowing up microscopic photographs of water samples.
“I take photo micrographs and blow them up and use them to make stencils, paintings and prints,” Sobel said. “When you’re looking at little cells of algae, they’re tiny and less compelling than when they’re three inches in diameter.”
During her June 2023 residency at the U-M Biological Station, Sobel plans to bring several cameras, a field microscope, a sketchbook and journal and “be a sponge.” She’ll give drawing lessons to the students and scientists on excursions through the forest, as well as hold workshops in the lab to teach them how to make an art book.
“Teaching people how to tell visual stories helps me learn more about it,” Sobel said. “It’s exciting to share my tools with scientists, and vice versa. You never know what to expect. I was teaching in Alaska last year and one of the professors I worked with was a fantastic draftsman. I was blown away.”
Sobel earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from U-M. She holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Hartford.
The public is invited to Sobel’s free lecture, titled “Artist in the Wilderness: Field Work and Art Making,” from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 21, at the U-M Biological Station.
After her residency, Sobel plans to go home to her studio, create a large work of art inspired by her time at Douglas Lake and curate a public exhibition.
Visit Sobel’s website.
