If there is a central ingredient in Ann Holsberry’s art, it’s not paints or brushes, the silk tapestries or the innovative chemical systems she uses to craft her unique art. It’s nature.
If nature is prominent in her art, it’s only because it’s prominent in Holsberry’s life. The Emeryville artist grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida and the shape of water was always in her peripheral. Nature was her muse, and its artifacts were her canvas.
Watch NBC Bay Area News free wherever you are
WATCH HERE“I was kind of a quiet young child,” Holsberry said. “I was making these universes that I could enter into.”
Holsberry is an artistic scavenger, collecting bits and pieces of natural artifacts from Bay Area beaches; bird nests, kelp, animal bones, shells. She hauls them back to her studio where she paints images of them, or arranges them into their own art.
But as she scoured the beaches, she began to notice that once ubiquitous strands of kelp were increasingly hard to find. She learned the diminishing kelp were part of a disastrous string of calamities traced to changing climate.
“We started finding that kelp beds were disappearing,” Holsberry said. “I was finding very little kelp on the beaches so I quickly decided I needed to document this.”
She documented it with her art using an old form of photography called cyanotypes. It involved coating the surface of paper or long silk materials with light-sensitive emulsions that when exposed to sunlight, would leave a ghostly white image on the surface. She experimented with the few kelp strands she could find, creating long colorful materials that illustrated the full size and shape of the kelp.
Climate in Crisis
“People can come in and get the sense of being underwater,” she said, “what it would be like swimming in it, that translucence gives you the sense of being in the kelp itself.”
The story of the kelp’s demise, dates back to an unusual aquatic occurrence in 2013 when the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the Bay Area coast began to warm — a phenomenon scientists nicknamed the warm blob. Around the same time, sea stars — or starfish — began dying of an unusual wasting disease which scientists connected to the unusually warm waters.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news with the Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
SIGN UP Sea stars are the main predator of purple sea urchins, and without that ecological check, the urchins multiplied unfettered, devouring the kelp beds along the North Coast — leaving barren underwater deserts in their wake.
Holsberry felt she also needed to tell the complete story of the kelp by including images of the purple urchins onto her banners. She created some using the cyanotype methods, others she would create from fabric and sew onto her silks. She hopes the beauty of her art pieces will draw in viewers who will then discover the more threatening story hidden beneath the surface of her art.
“I hope that they will appreciate the beauty,” Holsberry said as she sewed urchins onto her materials, “the resilience of nature but also the precariousness of the planet.”
Holsberry doesn’t see the story of the kelp as a harbinger of doom. To her, it’s a story of changing climate — and the need for people to educate themselves about what’s ahead, and what can be done. And if art can be the prime mover in all that, then so be it.
“I think we can’t sink into doom and gloom,” she said. “I hope there will be some way of showing up.”
An exhibit of Holsberry’s art will be on display at The Drawing Room: Annex located at 599 Valencia Street in San Francisco from Apr. 24 to Apr. 27.
