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Artist Carol Padberg Reconnects Humans With The Natural World

September 28, 2021
Submitted By: Brayden Ransom

Carol Padberg is an artist and the founder/director of the Interdisciplinary MFA at the Hartford Art School, Capping off a year of projects focused on the transformative power of art and ecology,  Padberg announces a range of works that showcase the importance of interspecies connectivity. Many are interactive—all at the cutting edge of eco-art. 

For 2021’s Farm Aid Festival held in Hartford on Saturday, Sept. 25, Padberg was honored to be the featured visual artist, joining founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp, and guest performers, for this annual festival first sparked as a response to the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Here, she created a hands-on, interactive art studio called Nook Farm House where visitors can learn to weave, dye with home-grown flowers, leaves and roots, and even work with the Oyster Mushroom mycelia to make living woven sculptures.

On Oct. 2, 2021, these organic sculptures will be featured in Meeting Mycelia, a public program hosted by Keney Park Sustainability Project in which Padberg guides participants in delving into the many ways mushrooms help create a cleaner, healthier, more-interconnected world. 

Finally, as an academic leader in her field, Padberg will release her critical thoughts on protocols for interspecies collaboration by way of talks, lectures, and literature, including her contributions to the book Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities, and a chapter on interspecies weaving with mycelia in the book Multispecies Storytelling to be published later this year by Punctum Press. Carol Padberg is Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Hartford, where she has founded the Nomad MFA in Art and Regenerative Culture. In 2022 she will be serving as a Fellow at the Guapamacataro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacån, Mexico where she will continue writing about multispecies art. 

No matter the medium, Padberg’s art practice is regenerative and promotes skills necessary to thrive in this decade. Whether making textiles with living organisms, raising sheep for homespun yarn to strengthen the local fibershed, or fostering mutual aid through a front yard food pantry, her work explores a deep and sustained relationship to place and community. 

Learn more at carolpadberg.com.