Arts and Agriculture
Melissa Cowper-Smith Turns Earth Into Art and Art Into Earth
By Stacy Bowers | Photography by Sara Reeves
Artist Melissa Cowper-Smith uses plant fibers grown on-site to make paper and encaustic paintings, blending agriculture and creativity.
So often, the idea of fine art gets tangled up in cliches of big cities, sterile gallery walls and cold modernism — something contained within exclusive walls, apart from the outside world. Artists like Melissa Cowper-Smith expose the unity of art and the natural world, right down to the fibers beneath the pigment.
The seeds for Cowper-Smith’s creative future were planted in childhood, growing up in Alberta, Canada, with a mother who both went to art school and adored gardening. “I was raised with a high level of connection to nature through my mom and my grandparents,” Cowper-Smith said. “I was making paintings out in the backyard when I was little.”
On her original plan for a less artful career path, she laughed recalling her notion to “be a scientist because that’s a sensible thing to do.” After landing an unusual job drawing lichen, she leaned into what she calls her “love affair of looking at things in nature.” She veered from science into art studies at the University of Victoria before moving to New York City to complete a Masters of Art at Hunter College.
“I was a country person stuck in a huge city,” she jokingly said. She couldn’t shake her longtime love for horses and being outside and found a way to teach riding lessons and ride in Prospect Park. She even bought a horse of her own and boarded it outside the city, traveling to ride on weekends.
After meeting her future husband James Dow, who was also interested in the arts and finding a more natural landscape to call home, the couple decided on Arkansas and, with their son and two horses in tow, made the trek south in 2011
On eight acres lovingly named “Wildland Gardens” in Morrilton, Dow and Cowper-Smith homestead, farm plants to sell, and cultivate other plants for artistic purposes. Using ancient papermaking practices, Cowper-Smith turns fibers from what she grows at Wildland Gardens into the paper that becomes her art. “Paper can be made from leaf fibers, seed fibers and bast fibers, like from the bark of a tree,” she explained.“I was raised with a high level of connection to nature through my mom and my grandparents.”
—Melissa Cowper-Smith
Artist Melissa Cowper-Smith uses plant fibers grown on-site to make paper and encaustic paintings, blending agriculture and creativity.
Hostas, cannas, daylilies, bast fibers from mulberry and many more plants find their way into papers on which she then prints and paints. She also presses flowers and leaves to add directly into the paper pulp during processing, adds horse hair into the mix for texture and interest, and has even burned old paper works to create fresh paper from the ashes. Cowper-Smith practices encaustic painting, which involves coating the paper with beeswax and resin as part of the painting process. “I don’t always know what I’m going to do until I’m doing it, and then I come up with ways to explain it later,” she said.
Papermaking ties Cowper-Smith’s art directly to the land she cultivates at Wildland Gardens through the fibers of plants she grows and through a reliable schedule governed by the farm. In the spring, she works the fields during the growing season and sells the young plants to other local gardeners; In the summer, she makes paper; and in the winter, she paints. Each season comes with helpful interns from nearby Hendrix College who study either agriculture or art.
Through her garden, she has also been exploring medicinal plants, growing traditional European herbs like valerian and fennel; Ayurvedic and Chinese medicinal plants; and native medicinal plants like yaupon holly, which can be brewed for its caffeine content. A proponent of permaculture, Cowper-Smith tends Wildland Gardens without the tilling and rows used in conventional farming, opting for a more holistic approach to growing. “I’m kind of a messy gardener,” she said. “I like plants that survive even if I don’t dote on them.”
One of many things Cowper-Smith advocates with Wildland Gardens is seed saving. “I’m very passionate about saving seeds, because what happens when you save the seeds from your garden and plant them again is you’re carrying the memory of that plant. The plants adapt slowly over time to their circumstances,” she explained. “We have to keep these plants alive, and this is the way it’s done. No one else is going to do it.” She estimates that Wildland Gardens saves and distributes hundreds of seeds every year through local seed swaps in the Conway area.
This theme of conservation weaves through Cowper-Smith’s art, where, according to her artist statement, she is “working to bridge the gap between climate change, memory, and forgetting … call[ing] attention to the timelessness of nature while exploring clouds, fires, and other phenomena in the world around her.” In the fibers of her paper, the surprise and unpredictability of making something by hand from the pulp of nature around her is as much art as the pigment carefully and thoughtfully added to the finished paper. Art and earth are inseparable here.
Find more information about Melissa Cowper-Smith and Wildland Gardens at cowpersmith.com
