Freshwater Ecosystems
Amanda Thackray, Blue Ghost Trawler, 2020, Hand pigmented cotton paper pulp, 30 x 89 x 0.5 inches
This retreat brings together four artists: Lauren Comito, Milcah Bassel, Amanda Thackray, and Rachel Frank. Each artist shares a love for nature and interest in the interconnections and exchanges between living and non-living things. During their week-long retreat, they will investigate the different ecosystems that exist in Lake George, including aquatic plants and wildlife.
The retreat and curated exhibition, Balancing Ecosystems, at the Courthouse Gallery in Lake George, NY, came together after artist Lauren Comito received a Community Art Grant from the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Council. Comito used this grant to examine and portray copepods, tiny crustacean zooplankton, along with aquatic plants found in Lake George, bringing to light the interconnected systems that contribute to the purity of the lake. Lauren Comito enlarges the scale of these microscopic organisms through cyanotype prints, making them visible. The images reveal the delicate and intricate structures of these tiny creatures that play an essential role in filtering and purifying the water, elevating them to the status of "guardians of the lake."
Milcah Bassel
Milcah Bassel will lead SUMMER POUR, a friendship-based papermaking project co-created annually with a rotating constellation of people, plants, and places. Set to discover new symbiotic relationships in each iteration, the project centers the intimate, the qualitative, the curious, and the handmade. Bassel's work, which has been exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and other venues both nationally and internationally, applies unique materials and processes to explore both cultural and natural structures. Her pieces in the exhibition are inspired by the use of a grid to represent water in ancient civilizations, creating intersecting rippling patterns on unique pulp papers.
Rachel Frank, Chrysalid Interchange: Hand and Pitcher Plant (North American Sarracenia), 2024
Stoneware ceramics with glazes, fabric, thread
31 x 14 x 3.5 inches
Brooklyn-based artist and wildlife rehabilitator Rachel Frank will lead the group on a birding tour around Huletts Landing and lead a clay extraction demonstration at Goldey Beach. Frank uses various material processes, such as ceramic, glass, bronze, fabric, and drawing. The material transformations that occur in the art-making process mimic the restorative processes that occur in the healing of lives and habitats. The repeating patterns in her work express the interconnections and exchanges between species.
Amanda Thackray will lead a scientific investigation of the water of Lake George. Amanda has used a Babylegs trawl to collect microplastics from the surface of the water. She will lead the group in looking at water samples under a microscope to observe the living and non-living elements. Thackray, who is currently the inaugural Environmental Protection Agency Artist in Residence for the Lower Passaic River in New Jersey, also utilizes grid patterns in handmade paper designs that combine notions of nature, industry, and human experience. Her netlike imagery is a malleable grid referencing both organic material and human intervention within an environment.
Lauren Comito, Water Guardians (copepods), 2025, cyanotype on paper, each print is 9 × 12 inches