Beth Logan - For the Savannah Morning News
Jan. 26, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
It is sad, but perversely fitting, that my meeting with the artist Lisa D. Watson occurred during the height of the devastating California fires. A relentless environmental warrior for the past three decades, she seeks balance between urbanization and conservation both in her artwork and in her landscape design company, Plan It Green Design, LLC, which creates native, drought-tolerant, and pollinator-friendly landscapes.
Originally from Ohio, Watson graduated with a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1991 and spent many years as a muralist for film sets in Los Angeles. Currently, she maintains a fully sustainable artist practice creating assemblages containing at least 90% reclaimed materials such as paper products, metal, industrial wood, and produce netting. A 2017 solo exhibition at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center highlighted concerns about loss of natural habitat when bridges, interstates, and overpasses are constructed, and her 2020 Deer Humans show at The Studios of Key West focused on the Key deer’s fragile natural habitat and on Georgia and Florida’s endangered plants.
Watson prepared for her most recent solo show, Avant Gardener, by participating in research trips with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance, and the Longleaf Pine Alliance. Again heavily leaning into native plant education, the multi-sensory show toured for nine months from 2022 into 2023, starting in Arts Southeast’s Ellis Gallery in Savannah before moving to the Coastal Discovery Museum on Hilton Head, and the Averitt Center for the Arts and IAB Gallery at Georgia Southern in Statesboro. “Around mid-May of 2023, I picked up the last pieces from Georgia Southern,” Watson recalls. “I brought them home, wrapped them, and went, ‘OK, what was missing?’
“I had spread the word about our fragile ecosystems, but I didn’t feel accomplished personally. I was lacking something in my creative process. So, I called up Clair and a month later I was here in the hand-building studio relearning how to work with clay.”
Watson refers to Clair Buckner, proprietor of the magical, community-focused Clayer & Co Pottery Studio on Bonaventure Road in Thunderbolt. Watson continues, “I had not touched clay in 30 years. Back in college, I had studied under a Japanese American ceramic artist called Ban Kajitani who started a ceramic sculpture department. I came here and just started building and building in clay.”
And this was the creative spark that she had been missing. “I will forever be a potter,” she says with a smile.
Clayer & Co. is home to the hand-building studio as well as jewelry classrooms, a wheel classroom, a room for storing and applying glazes, kilns, a retail shop selling clays and pottery tools, and the fabulous Ology Gallery, curated by Buckner’s partner, Wendy Melton. It wasn’t long before Melton and Buckner asked Watson to have a show in that space.
I’ve spent almost a year and a half preparing.” The resulting Surroundings, Daydreaming in the Chaos, a solo show of her ceramics, mixed-media collages, and paintings, opens on Saturday, Feb. 1 and runs through March 8.
Watson’s work is imaginative and yearning, conveying a longing for environmental harmony and a vision for positive change.
She shows me a large black sculptural installation of debris and pollution. The title piece of the show, Daydreaming in the Chaos contains an army of ceramic Carolina gopher frogs, an endangered species, sitting in the mucky blackness and staring at a video Watson filmed of their ideal, boggy habitat. “This one’s a heart breaker.”
We look at the Garden Mates series of ceramic wild birds (and a bat!) she has seen in her Savannah backyard, and we examine collaged paintings chastising us with the ramifications of our lack of regard for our environment―a flooded street, a billboard by the edge of a South Carolina interstate―places infused with daydreams of achieving balance between man-made infrastructure and wilderness. Watson has “this incredible urge to document a strange little house on a busy street in LA, a grassy curve along a freeway interchange in Savannah, and my own backyard habitat.”
We look at an installation called Preserve portraying native pitcher plants that have been beautifully sculpted out of clay. Several of them are flowering and display surprisingly large yellow blooms.
Central to the exhibition of 43 new works is her Soil Saints series, five hand-built sculptures of beloved friends and family members. Bisque-fired clay gives each a suitably deep brown, soil color.
Three of the haloed saints are deceased: Her grandmother is portrayed holding a butterfly. “She died when my dad was three weeks old. I think about her a lot.”
Her grandfather, an Italian immigrant to Pittsburgh during the '20s, is portrayed with his WW1 medal below a nest entwined with the red, green, and white colors of the Italian flag because “this is where he made his nest.” He wears overalls as “he was a big vegetable gardener.”
Writer and gardening enthusiast Jane Fishman is portrayed with seeds and a Sapphic vintage belt buckle “that I bet she would have loved. Jane and I really didn’t bond over gardening weirdly, as we gardened very differently. We became friends at a party when we both started dancing. She was the coolest.”
Watson continues, “These saints are people who made, or are making, a difference.”
One portrays Lisa Lord, a biologist and conservation programs director with the Longleaf Alliance, who works to restore wildlife populations for listed or at-risk species including gopher frog, gopher tortoise, and red-cockaded woodpecker. One is of her friend, Shane, who had a gardening business in LA and taught her about native plants.
As always, creative gallerist Wendy Melton had a vision for how to most creatively and impactfully install the work. As one enters the gallery, Watson has painted a mural depicting the LA fires―burning palm trees, the cutout silhouette of a man she saw on a newscast running into the flames to rescue a bunny (“I just lost it. I cried for an hour.”), and also the beauty of how she dreams our world can be.
But Watson is tired. Conservation advocacy work is exhausting. “Each person must make better decisions,” she believes. “I’m continuously thinking of ways to save our indigenous animals, flora, and the few remaining untouched wild areas…I guess until I see positive environmental changes by humans, I can’t really relax.”
Come to her show and help her carry that burden. It matters.
Lisa D. Watson’s show, Surroundings, Daydreaming in the Chaos, opens on Saturday, Feb. 1 at Ology Gallery located “around back” at 415 Bonaventure Road in Thunderbolt. (I’m still waiting for some signage.) The reception is from 5:30-8 p.m. and there is a closing reception on Saturday, March 8.
Sept. 2, 2022
There’s a sense, throughout culture, that the world is ending. In the September 5, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, for example, there is a “Talk of the Town” piece that describes a dj set by Chelsea Manning as “the world is burning down, so let’s party while we can.” And there’s a satire by Simon Rich about a future human who left earth because “the skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn’t walk across the street without collapsing.” Add to that shows like Station Eleven, post-apocalyptic novels like Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam and basically every Marvel movie, and you get the sense that human beings are soon to be extinct unless we find a savior, preferably a very butch man or woman who has an immediate solution for climate change.
Of course, there’s good reason to believe that humans might be in trouble. Thus far, 2022 has been one of the hottest years on record. This Labor Day weekend alone, there is expected to be record-breaking temperatures on the West coast and more rain in already-flooded Texas – not to mention three tropical storms developing in the Atlantic Ocean.But what if we are anticipating the apocalypse not because of what nature is doing to us – but instead, because of what we’ve already done to our built environments.
Where I live, in Savannah, Georgia, you only need to drive about ten blocks from my house to find miles and miles of strip malls dominated by concrete parking lots, corporate logos and sparse foliage, if there is any foliage at all. Travel just 10 miles west, to Pooler, and the landscape is dominated by highways punctuated by smoking fields razed for housing developments. Of course, Americans think that the apocalypse is nigh. We’ve obliterated natural environments to build habitats devoid of nature without thinking about what it would do to our psyches. The end times is not a heat event; it’s a Costco built next to a mansion next to a warehouse for Amazon.
You really feel this deeply walking through “Avant Gardener: A Creative Exploration of Imperiled Species,” an exhibition of new work by Lisa D. Watson on view at Sulfur Studios in Savannah through Saturday, October 22. Consisting of works in a variety of mediums including collage, painting, sculpture and installation, the show assembles what is best described as a “church of nature.” Rendered in exquisite detail – Watson worked for over fifteen years as a production designer in Hollywood – that artwork is dominated by depictions of native plant species that are endangered and rare due to human development.
Watson has always been an avid gardener. Raised in Ohio, she spent most of her childhood afternoons playing in the wooded area behind her house. Her grandfather, Frank Barisano, an immigrant from Italy, was a lifelong gardener who planted 104 species of tomatoes every year, along with various other plants including a pear limb grafted onto a cherry tree. He passed his love of gardening (or maybe it was already in her blood) to Watson, who planted her own garden behind her home in Los Angeles. She used mostly species of flora native to the area. “It took me two years to establish the garden, but after that, I always had bees and butterflies,” she notes. In 2008, tired of the pace of life in Los Angeles, she moved to Savannah, where she established Plan It Green Design, a sustainable gardening business that she runs in tandem with her art practice. The two are intertwined. “It’s more rewarding for me if people plant a 6’x6’ native garden after seeing my show than it is for me to sell a painting,” she says.
The exhibition, in turn, is part art show, part teaching tool and part shrine. Watson’s subjects include the semaphore, a cactus that used to be found throughout Florida, but is now endangered due to habitat destruction and sea-level rise; the Coontie, a shrub that was harvested to the point of extinction, but was brought back to life by conservation efforts in the 1970s; and the Longleaf Pine Forest, a 4,500-acre preserve full of plants native to Georgia that is so threatened by poaching that its location is kept secret. (Watson received access through her work in the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance.)
The work in the show originated from paintings of bridges and highway structures that Watson began making in 2015. “Humans create all of these connections to get to places faster,” she says. “But what are we passing by?” She noticed that even in these barren landscapes, wildflowers and plants often grew; in fact, when she stopped to look at the flora, she often found endangered or rare species of plants. “I’m a ditch witch,” she laughs.
At first, she was intimidated by the thought of including plants and flowers in her artwork. ““Plants,” Watson says. “Are perfect.” She found access to their structures when she began cutting them out of materials such as cardboard. “I really started understanding plants’ shapes and structures and twists in this way,” she says. “It makes me a better gardener as well as a better painter.” Blossoms and leaves began to populate her paintings of desolate human structures including gas stations, parking lots and highways.
Watson, who works with reclaimed materials such as cardboard, broken cement and glitter, which she collects from thrift stores – “to seal it into an artwork so that it can't go back into the environment,” she says – tries to stay as true to the original color of the plants and flowers she captures as possible. To do so, she uses acrylic paint from Starlandia, a reclaimed art supply store that sells discarded supplies from, among other artists, students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Although her conservation efforts are all encompassing, she doesn’t pontificate. There’s a sense, throughout the exhibition, that Watson is using sustainable materials, and creating artworks that draw attention to conservation matters because she has a passion for her subject. Her sense of obligation towards the natural world grew from love, and you feel that love in her artwork.
While some of the works are overtly hortative, such as a panel that shows, on one side, a barren concrete environment presided over by a construction worker holding a building plan, and on the other, a forest full of animals native to the Southeast presided over by a self-portrait of Watson, many are powerful in their persuasiveness. The exhibition opens with a large polyptych panel that shows various species that can be found in the Longleaf Pine Forest. Dense, otherworldly and gorgeous, the vast mixed media work has all of the painterly qualities of a work by Caspar David Friedrich, the only difference being that it’s painted on cardboard rather than canvas.
In the center of the main gallery sit two reclaimed church pews. They face a wall of small artworks that depict flowers and plants, and are connected by loops that mimic the quality of steel and concrete. Watson intends the installation to serve as a sort of altar; she hopes one day to install these works, and many more like them, in an actual abandoned church as a sort of altar to nature. Like so many artists, all she needs is the funding to make this dream a reality.
And what a dream it would be. To walk into an abandoned place of worship, and encounter a room full of love. Even in the midst of the smoking ruins of the apocalyptic landscapes that we’ve built for convenience, flowers still bloom. Or at least they do in Watson’s artwork.