By Danielle Kalamaras

Mother Nature anthropomorphizes the natural world as a nurturing force symbolized through the endless love a mother provides to her child. To mother nature is to reciprocate this metaphorical life-giving force through acts of ecological sustainability. This maternal trope is a figure of speech, one that personifies eternal love into acts of conscious living. Artist Mary Ivy Martin unearths this mythologized generosity by literally showing what it means to love, and be loved, by nature.  


Martin uses her own body and interacts with organic materials to explore more universal questions regarding human existence and contemporary identity formation. After living around the country including Virginia, New Mexico, and Arizona, Martin has been settled in Bushwick, Brooklyn for the last several years. Her work is featured in the online exhibition Un-Natural Nature, curated by SciArt Center's Arts Program coordinator Danielle Kalamaras. 

By Joe Ferguson


The tradition of working with clay is thousands of years old, but recently a group of artists, architects, and designers have begun to explore the fabrication possibilities of coupling the medium with digital technologies. Unlike engineered materials--like concrete, composite wood, or steel--clay has its own inherent qualities that make virtual predictions difficult. This unpredictability results in a practice that requires technical savvy, imagination, patience, and a craft sensibility.

Data Clay: Digital Strategies For Parsing The Earth is a new exhibit at The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, California, that showcases the work of pioneers who combine digital fabrication techniques and ceramic materials.  Below is an interview with one of the curators, Joshua G. Stein, who is head of Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based studio that investigates the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary technology.

By Joe Ferguson

By the time I entered grade school, NASA had been to the moon and Skylab was orbiting the planet. One of my most prized possessions was my second-hand copy of National Geographic’s Earth’s Moon Map. I used to lie on my back in my bed with a box under my feet and knees looking at that map because the position seemed similar to pictures I’d seen of astronauts preparing for a moon launch.

From Earth’s Moon Map to Charles Schultz’s Astro Beagle, every image I saw of the space program in those days was supportive. I was too young to question all the forces involved in what was happening. As I got older, however, I was confronted with different views. In college I was told to examine the source of everything I read, and I became acquainted with the politics of scientific research. The influential 20th century artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) tried to reconcile conflicting views on scientific progress in his Stoned Moon project. In July of 1969, he was asked by the NASA Art Program to commemorate the first manned spaceflight to the moon.

By Danielle Kalamaras

Through her lens, artist Laura Krasnow creates dreamy imagery of the natural world. Anachronism meets the contemporary in her Declarative Memory series. Through soft sepia tones, her diptychs combine the nostalgia of the Polaroid with the modern-day prevalence of digital photography. Declarative memory is a form of long-term memory and is an exercise in consciously recalling facts and knowledge of the past. The images photographed in her series are universal enough for viewers to pinpoint a similar past event of an idyllic walk through a forested grove, encouraging a personal affection towards an individual moment at ease with nature.

Krasnow’s passion is art, science and technology. After obtaining an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to school to study math, physics and computer science. Her work is featured in the online exhibition Un-Natural Nature, curated by SciArt Center's Arts Program coordinator Danielle Kalamaras. Read on to learn more about her artistic and scientific inspirations.