Christine Collins: Reclaiming the Landscape

Christine Collins’ large-scale photographs of a compost pile are among the many highlights of You Can’t Get There From Here: The 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. Part of a series titled “Reclamation,” her images are bold, colorful, and highly detailed—calling to mind Dutch paintings that also portray an agrarian lifestyle.

In “Reclaiming the Landscape,” Collins talks about her work and the development of her ideas in relationship to the sustainable food movement and our shifting relationship to the natural world. As an artist, Collins carefully considers how local farms and community agriculture has enjoyed an elevated status in contemporary life. In this lecture, she shares her thoughts on this subject, as well as how her ideas relate to art history and manifest themselves in her photographic series that portrays a compost pile as “wild, sprawling, and ever-changing.”