Rooted Resistance: Art, Care, and Environmental Activism

Jasmine Murrell
The Soldiers of Love, 2024
Photographic Collage, 25” x 23” x 1”

Dr. Marlo E. Paul, MD, and her husband, botanist and biochemist Dr. Anthony D.Paul, are redefining care and community through their incredible work as farmers. They grow medicinal plants on their farm, providing free healthcare to people in the Black Belt region—where many lack access to Medicaid due to Congress voting against expanded healthcare. Combining rigorous scientific research with cultural remedies nearly lost. Their work addresses chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes, and more, using the power of homegrown plants.

In Alabama’s Black Belt, where COVID rates are high and hospitals are understaffed, Dr. Marlo Paul and her plant biologist husband, Anthony, are making house calls and providing free herbal remedies from their own farm. As the virus engulfed her community, Moss was visited by Dr. Paul and her husband Anthony, a retired plant biologist. The couple, who run a medicinal herb farm and wellness center in the region, drove 50 miles from their farm in Sawyerville to check on Moss. Dr. Paul, who is the only Black female doctor within three neighboring counties, took Moss’s vitals and offered health tips, then the Pauls gave her a generous supply of an herbal supplement they produced on their

farm. They also provided the supplement to several of Moss’ family members and the doctor phoned her daily to offer support and monitor symptoms—all without charging her a penny.

This photograph is from Murrell’s recent body of work documenting “plant whisperers” who heal their communities. Blending ancient traditions with futuristic concepts, the project celebrates suppressed plant-based rituals and highlights the connection between humanity and living ecosystems.

Nina Wood
She Rises With Roots, 2025
Mixed media on tracing paper, 59” x 26”

Through mixed media—layering soft papers, watercolor, and stitching—I explore the power, beauty, and resilience of the female figure, as it intersects with nature and acts of care in a tender moment. I am playing with a parallel between the Mother Tree and the often-undervalued role of maternal caregiving in human communities. My work centers around the image of a maternal figure emerging from and intertwined with tree roots, adorned with a stylised pictation of the banana leaf, and thin threads, which is representative of regeneration. The embellishments celebrate the invisible nurturing role of both trees and caregivers as anchoring root systems that nourish, support, and protect.

Breastfeeding is portrayed as sacred and as an act of resistance. In a world that often conceals breastfeeding, I want to make it visible, revered, and honored. Like a tree’s root system, breastfeeding is deeply connected to the similar function and purpose as a biological system of unseen nutrient delivery that supports the growth, development, and survival of dependent life. It reclaims body autonomy and highlights maternal devotion, elevating what is often hidden or undervalued into something worthy of celebration and reflection.

I believe the overlap between the Mother Tree and maternal caregiving is powerful and supports a vision of collective respect.  By blending organic forms of trees with human figures, I hope to create images that honor nurturing and caregiving as an act of love rooted in biology and shared with nature.

Becky Brown

Safe Keeping (Carseat), 2025

Found objects and paint, approx. 32” x 50” x 40”

Becoming a parent can bring anxiety, financial burden, and conflict with one’s environmental goals due to the sheer volume of new stuff entering your home. Much of it is used for only a short period, generating massive waste. Networks of parents counteract this problem by passing along their outgrown gear, and their wisdom. Gaining another family’s bouncy seat also means first-hand knowledge about life with a baby, while a hand-me-down potty brings insight into this next developmental step.  

Like the root systems of trees sharing nutrients, parenting communities ease both the financial and environmental burden of child-rearing by getting the most possible use out of a product. Online networks for local parents, “Buy Nothing” groups, and second-hand stores also help. Consumer culture makes parents think they need a new product every day, with relentless targeted advertising and each purchase only a click away. When products claim increased safety, comfort or opportunity for your child, it is hard to resist. But resistance is possible, in dialogue with others—with exchange serving as the catalyst.This sculpture began with my third-hand carseat—finally showing its wear-and-tear—which explodes with other unrecyclable baby and kid gear: used bottles and pumping equipment, pacifiers, broken toys, stray parts, single shoes and stuffies left on the curb. Painted in solid colors to unify heterogenous collections, my ongoing Safe Keeping series reflects our culture through its endless cast-offs. Personal and anonymous objects stuffed together explore connections between people and their belongings, including attachment and memory. In this case, they highlight the material excess of parenting, the potential for waste, and the possibility of reuse.

Ghost of a Dream
your kiss is like a lost ghost, 2025
Layering of 47 images of palm trees on fire captured from online news articles about the Eaton and Palisades Fires, printed and mounted on dibond, 36” x 36” 

Through haunting layers of climate disaster imagery—from forest fires and melting glaciers to coral bleaching, mining sites, and textile waste—our series Is This Paradise… serves as both a visual record and an emotional response to life in the Anthropocene. We began this body of work after having our daughter and losing two studios to superstorms that flooded our spaces. Those experiences made us realize how deeply we wanted to create art that reflects our hope for a world willing to confront and repair the ecological and political crises we face. These works are acts of care and protest, calling attention to the environmental emergencies that have become disturbingly ordinary.

Each piece begins with our growing archive of online news images, carefully sorted and collaged into dense, ghostly fields. This process is our way of bearing witness—turning the constant flood of disaster imagery into something that asks for pause, reflection, and action.In your kiss is like a lost ghost, we layered images from the Eaton and Palisades fires in California. Several of our friends lost their homes and studios to those fires. In the blink of an eye, their worlds were upended—years of work gone. At a loss for how to help, we created this piece to raise funds for those who had lost so much. Fire here isn’t a single event but a recurring wound. Layer upon layer, the work holds the weight of grief and loss, while reaching toward resilience.

Allison Belolan
Lobaria pulmonaria 1, 2025
Natural dye, silkscreen, and acrylic paint on handmade recycled paper, handmade plant based paper, and paper collage on art board, 39” x 42.5”

Lobaria pulmonaria 1 explores collaboration as both biological fact and environmental model. I created this collage using discarded papers transformed into handmade sheets, combined with plant materials and natural dyes to build layered compositions where each fragment maintains its character while contributing to a unified whole. The work focuses on Lobaria lichen, a symbiotic organism where fungus and algae combine to create something more resilient than either could achieve independently. The fungus forms protective structure and retains moisture while the algae produces nutrients through photosynthesis, their interdependence creating new life capable of thriving on bare rock and tree bark.

The textured surfaces and layered composition embody networks of care and creation, drawing from lichen as a model of mutual support where organisms thrive through interdependence rather than competition. Through intimate engagement with recycled materials and natural processes, this piece reflects the collaborative relationships necessary for environmental stewardship, demonstrating how careful observation and material respect can foster sustainable connection.

Jacq Groves

Left: Embodied Infrastructure II, 2025
Glazed ceramic with glaze decal created from risograph print 17.5” x 16” x 2.5”

Right: Embodied Infrastructure III, 2025
Glazed ceramic with glaze decal created from risograph print 17” x 15.5” x 3”Embodied Infrastructure investigates the resilience and relational intelligence of the natural world, with particular attention to how trees physically adapt to human-made structures. This ongoing series of ceramic wall-bound works feature images of edaphoecotropism, or the propensity of living tree tissue to engulf surrounding infrastructure. The glaze decals in this ceramic series were created from scans from CMYK risograph prints derived from disposable film photos taken around NYC. I approach environmental activism through a lens shaped by care and interdependence. In these works, the cyclical entanglement as the tree continues to grow despite obstruction suggests both adaptation and a quiet, yet powerful refusal. This resonates with the slow, often-invisible embodied experience of resisting systems of harm.

More specifically, this body of work is generatively supported by writers and thinkers within crip theory, queer ecology, and trans theory. I’m curious how we might see ourselves and our own lived experiences mimicked in surrounding complex, entangled ecosystems. During this time, when it’s so critical to resist systemic barriers that limit bodily autonomy, how can we find energy and power from witnessing the resilient, embodied intelligence already growing around us?

Shweta Bist
Recycling, 2025
Dye sublimation print on satin, zarī and sequins lace, petit café rod, 58” x 40”

The Sh!t I Do series draws on Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989) which conceptualizes mothering as a form of physical, intellectual, and emotional labor, continually shaped by and responsive to the needs of the child and the surrounding environment. Using myself as the subject, I stage and composite photographs and digital drawings to create domestic scenes depicting a mother at work. She meets the viewer’s gaze, insisting on acknowledgment of her labor. The domestic setting may suggest comfort, but deeper consideration is needed. 

Recycling exemplifies the “third shift” in environmentalism under neoliberalism, where the responsibility for environmental care—such as managing household waste and recycling—is increasingly offloaded onto individuals, disproportionately mothers. Rather than enforcing corporate accountability for carbon neutrality, the burden shifts to private initiative, further expanding the realm of unpaid labor. In a society where power is synonymous with capital, care work is relegated to invisibility, often adversely affecting the financial, mental, and physical health of caregivers. This project aims to assert that these issues need attention and hopes to encourage dialogue about mothering as thoughtful, value-generating work that responds to and contributes to society.

While layering echoes the layered experience of motherhood, the final flattened images in this series play with visual space, using humor to draw attention to the complexities of mothering under capitalism. Some objects in these household scenes are contemporary “necessities,” while others allude to a bi-cultural home. Outfits fashioned with pictures of demonetized Indian Rupees contextualize the mother’s subjectivity. Gold lace, used for framing, underscores the importance of gold to Indian women as a form of social security in patriarchal communities. Lace designs for the outfits are inspired by the household textiles I grew up with, influenced by European techniques introduced during British colonization in India. I incorporate them to reference my cultural history and honor the essential, yet undervalued, creative labor of the women who came before me.

Bakula Nayak

Left: RULE THE ROOST, 2025
Mixed media 22” x 30”

Right: BLOOMING, 2025
Mixed media 22” x 30”

My series of mixed media works explores the deep connections between women, food systems, and environmental care, centering the overlooked role of women as stewards of land, tradition, and sustenance. Each piece in the series features a monumental plant or animal paired with a small, nude female figure. These women are not passive observers; their vulnerability is not weakness—it is intimacy, care, and interdependence.

Collaged with vintage mechanical blueprints, the works place these organic, nurturing relationships in direct contrast with the hard lines of industrialization and mechanized agriculture. These mechanical schematics are symbols of control, extraction, and commodification. When juxtaposed with the scale of the plants and the intimacy of the figures, they highlight what has been lost as traditional farming practices—often sustained by women—are replaced by environmentally destructive systems.

Like the “Mother Trees” that nourish forest ecosystems, the women in these paintings serve as silent caregivers—nurturing, preserving, resisting. Their resistance is quiet but radical. It lies in continuing ancestral practices, preserving seed knowledge, feeding communities, and caring for ecosystems in ways that are inherently relational and reciprocal. This maternal ecological labor—often unrecognized—is a form of resistance against the systemic erasure of traditional knowledge and the depersonalization of environmental responsibility.These pieces also challenge the dominant narrative that places environmental healing solely on individual choices, and instead draw attention to the systems that extract from both land and labor—especially female labor.