Barbara Holmes pulls inspiration from The Great Basin, a vast region of the American West that holds water like a cauldron. Many of her materials are sourced in the region, and her work is in response to the environmental concerns of the area.This area spans nearly all of Nevada, and portions of California, Oregon, Wyoming and Baja California, and is the largest region of contiguous endorheic watersheds (those that do not drain to the ocean) in North America.
Holmes is an artist-educator based in Southern California who is currently on sabbatical from Saddleback College where she is Associate Professor and Director of the Art Gallery within the Art Department.
So what does a multimedia artist-educator with an environmental muse do on her sabbatical? She experiments with new media, she studies, she visits and she attends a residency at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture.
The Ranch is not technically in the Great Basin, but is situated nearby, and on a long drive up from California, Holmes will have opportunities to explore and gather. As her biography states, she is “known for reimagining discarded materials and construction waste,” and her practice “imbues these elements with renewed context and meaning.”
Environmental currents carry through her work, which is primarily three-dimensional, but she is also incorporating more two-dimensional elements of traditional and nontraditional printmaking. She is interested in the land-art movement and says her entry point for looking at environmental art is interpreting how the artist is dealing with the environment.
“People view the Great Basin as resource-rich, wastelands nobody cares about,” says Holmes. She says while there is some recreational land use, the area is primarily impacted by issues surrounding mining, ranching, and the protection of Indigenous lands. “They’re very fragile environments and often the first indicators of a tipping point in our global climate crisis.”
While at The Ranch, Holmes will be nearing the end of her sabbatical and plans to work on two-dimensional art projects. She would like to continue to experiment with nature prints, gel plates, and working with cyanotypes; and she says, these may combine into collage works.
There are two opportunities for the community to join Barbara Holmes at The Ranch:
- July 19th from 10am-1pm at New Traditions: Printmaking with Nature Workshop
- July 30 from 4-6pm at Open Studio
Holmes will be joined at the Open Studio by other artists in her cohort: Jazmyn Crosby, Scott Kidall, and Ketzia Schoneberg.
