Join artist Robin Vuchnich and landscape entomology professor Dr. Emily Meineke for an afternoon spent learning about and creating with pressed flora. Vuchnich and Meineke will begin the workshop in Studio B with an introduction to the ecosystems relevant to Vuchnich’s work, as well as to the flora to be used in the workshop. After that, participants will move to Studio A to begin crafting their own pressed-plant artwork to bring home.
All supplies are provided, and all experience levels are welcome. Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season will be on view in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Gallery through January 3, 2027.
About the presenters
Dr. Emily Meineke is the Assistant Professor of Landscape Entomology, Hellmann Fellow at University of California, Davis. She and her lab members investigate the effects of climate change on plants, plant-eating insects, and their interactions with one another. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics, harnessing advanced pedagogical techniques, notably art-science fusion. From 2016 to 2019, Emily was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where she used herbarium specimens to document how urbanization and climate change have affected plant-insect relationships worldwide over the past 120 years.
New-media artist Robin Vuchnich draws on the herbarium of nineteenth-century philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, now housed at Harvard University, to explore the effects of biodiversity loss through immersive, interactive installations. For In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season, Vuchnich collaborated with scientists tracking species decline in Concord, Massachusetts, to transform Thoreau’s collection of pressed plants into a large-scale visualization of environmental change. The work reveals a startling reality: More than half of the species Thoreau documented around Walden Pond are now declining toward local extinction. Through projected imagery, responsive digital flowers, and soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond, Vuchnich invites viewers to reflect on the fragile relationship between memory, place, and the natural world.
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