Julie Farstad
@therealjuliefarstad
@FlowersForMarlborough
Artist Statement
In recent years, my artwork has developed into two different directions. One body of work focuses on the celebration of and advocacy for the planting of native flowers. Ancient Flowers is the studio-based, interior-facing manifestation of this idea. In Ancient Flowers, I layer images of native blooms grown in my own garden and in gardens around Kansas City. Painted with close attention to the architecture of the flowers, these paintings are intensely saturated and disorientating as I stack blossoms on top of one another compositionally. I want viewers to fall in love with wildflowers in the hopes that they will begin to recognize them, and perhaps even plant them in their own landscapes.
Flowers For Marlborough is the site-specific, public facing variation of this project. In Flowers For Marlborough, I paint and install large acrylic paintings on Tyvek of native plants on the boarded up windows of vacant buildings in the blighted neighborhood of Marlborough, Kansas City, where I live. This project, done with permission from the properties’ owners, seeks to call attention to the environmental and urban decay of my neighborhood that was once lush prairie. I want to introduce the formal and purposeful beauty of native plants to my neighbors, as well as offer a kind of psychological relief to my community who face the effects of living in the ugly aftermath of Kansas City’s racist policy of redlining. As part of this project, I winter sow native plant seedlings to give away to my neighbors in the spring, so they can experience the joy of living with the plants and the amazing pollinators they host. I also do painting workshops with neighborhood children, teaching them about the importance of native plants and using art as a way to create a communal appreciation for them. It is my hope that Marlborough can become known not for its blight, but for its stewardship of native plants and pollinators.
Urgent Experiments in Tending is an ongoing series of improvisational installations that explore the complex interweaving of the roles of mother and artist, as well as the anxieties I feel raising children in the anthropocene. In these pieces, I bring together intimate oil paintings on Yupo of my children and my plants, with live plants, often in stages of propagation, to explore the impulse to love and care for living beings, the amazement at cycles of growth and regeneration, and the interconnection between humans and plants. The presence of grow lights and electrical cords, as well as blue painters tape that attaches some of the paintings to the wall, are signs of improvisation and adaptation, survival skills for all living things, especially during this time of ongoing and amplified climate crisis. The eco prints of native plants and propagating succulents emphasize the transitional and ephemeral nature of raising kids and tending to the ecosystems in which we live. The fading dye in the ecoprints is also a metaphor for the natural loss inherent in growth, babies become children and then adults, succulent leaves will spawn new plants, dying in the process.