Meet Your Neighbors

Vivian Visser: Sculpted by Nature

The pursuit of sculpture drew Vivian Visser to the big city. But nature, not tall buildings, has always provided her inspiration.

When Visser left her home in rural Wayland, Michigan, to attend college at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, she soon missed the country. “I didn’t realize what I had until I left it,” she says. “People need to be put in that position where they have to think and feel about nature.”

Surrounded by the urban landscape, Visser gravitated even more strongly to natural subjects. “Even without my realizing,” she says, “nature found its way into everything I made.”

In 1998, Visser moved to Chicago to begin her career as a sculpture artist. Throughout college and for some time after, she had been able to draw inspiration from childhood memories. But eventually, she discovered she needed new motivation. She began contacting local conservation groups, seeking ways to reconnect with the wilderness. “I wanted to learn for my sculpture and I needed something hands-on,” she says.

Visser found her source in 2002, when she became a “recorder” with the Chicago Wilderness land audit program. There she saw the opportunity to deepen her ecological knowledge. The volunteer-fueled monitoring project led her to several new natural areas. (“Odd-ball sites,” she says. “Patches alongside parks, areas that were not being actively restored.”) There, hovering around randomly generated points with a plant expert, she helped record trees and plants and learned about their place in ecosystem biodiversity. “I started the audits knowing pretty much nothing,” she says, “but I listened and asked a ton of questions and eventually learned a lot.”

The audit experience also introduced Visser to a network of other volunteer opportunities. She soon began helping to clear invasive brush at North Park Village Nature Center, near her home in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago.

Visser’s nature experiences continued to inform her art. By this time, she had become focused on creating completely natural works. Today, her abstract pieces deftly arrange organic materials—twigs, thin willow, seeds, and wool—into eclectic shapes, often some kind of vessel. “My art is about accessing the part of human nature that’s connected with nature itself,” she says. Her artist statement makes clear her intention to take her viewers “into the raw and mysterious realm of Nature where I believe we are vulnerable and the most real.” Visser, now 37, mainly salvages her materials from landscaping projects. She’s worked out arrangements with a local cemetery and a country club, where she collects plant matter that has been cut down or pruned.

While conservation gave new direction to her art, Visser has found that the work has its own meaning. Her pride in it is palpable as she discusses one of her trips to North Park Village. “Our job was to clear buckthorn. Eventually the area went all the way from dense thicket to savanna. To see that it’s moving back to what it should be is very satisfying.” Visser regularly attends workdays in other Chicago-area preserves as well, traveling everywhere by public transit.

More recently, Visser joined the Openlands Project TreeKeepers program. As a certified TreeKeeper, she can now aid in maintaining the health of trees in preserves, parks, and urban areas. The program became a way to actively learn to identify new species. “I learned a lot, but there is still a lot I don’t know…Like, see those holes in that tree bark? I see that everywhere. I want to find out what that is.”

This past year, she was asked to participate in Chicago’s “CoolGlobes” exhibition, for which she designed and constructed a globe themed around an alternative energy mechanism called the Pelamis Device.

Visser wants to continue doing projects that combine conservation and art. “I would love to do both full time,” she says. Barring that miracle of scheduling, she may have to be satisfied with following her own advice: “Do what moves you and you can move others.”

View more of Vivian Visser’s art at vivianvisser.com. To participate in the land audits, visit habitatproject.org (scroll down to “Plant Community Monitoring”).

— Katherine DeVries