Editorial Reflections

Artist explores her love of nature as she creates art on Instagram posts

In August, we saw natural habitat for wildlife turn into ash as wildfires raged through North Central Washington, the Cascades, near the Yakama Reservation, within the Colville Confederated Reservation, near the Spokane Reservation, and through northern Spokane areas.

Soon after that we watched on media as glaciers melted in Tibet and unleashed landslides and floods that swept through villages in Tibet and Nepal, wiping the landscape clean, wiping away homes of villagers and the villagers themselves.

Meanwhile, I've been watching as my daughter-in-law, artist Megan Martens-Haworth, chair of the art department at Spokane Falls Community College, created a charcoal drawing of a big pine tree on an eight-by-four-and-a-half-foot sheet of paper at the college. Her idea was to make it a ghost tree, by erasing the charcoal and leaving a ghostly image of all of the tree except for its stump.

In the tree, she placed birds, a horned owl, a squirrel, a martin, a porcupine and at the foot a sleeping doe. As a nature-lover, she wanted to depict the bleak life of wildlife without a habitat. She painted some birds—a sparrow and a northern flicker—holding what she called "a ghost twig" as if looking for a place to nest. "If we don't have trees, they don't have nests," said Megan. In another painting she showed birds fighting in an empty tree. "If we don't have berries, they don't have anything to eat," she said.

As she created the pieces for her solo exhibition," This Was Our Home," Sept. 21 to Oct 29, at the Esvelt Gallery at Columbia Basin Community College in Pasco, she made comments as she created posts on Instagram over the course of a year and a half as she completed the series.

In creating the pieces, Megan explored how humankind connects with the natural world, hoping to remind humans of their role as stewards of the Earth. Her goal is to promote environmental conservation and foster an understanding of the interconnection between the existence of humans and elements of nature that support the lives of wildlife.

"I want to inspire compassion, conservation and appreciation for the diverse creatures that share the planet with us," said Megan, whose work is at instagram@megandmartens.

The poster for the exhibit is a fox peeking out from a burned-out stump. Other pieces include bees, butterflies and other pollinators flitting among ghostly flowers.

Her hope is to start people thinking and acting to protect the nature around us.

Mary Stamp – editor