It is sad, but perversely fitting, that my meeting with the artist Lisa D. Watson occurred during the height of the devastating California fires. A relentless environmental warrior for the past three decades, she seeks balance between urbanization and conservation both in her artwork and in her landscape design company, Plan It Green Design, LLC, which creates native, drought-tolerant, and pollinator-friendly landscapes.
Originally from Ohio, Watson graduated with a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1991and spent many years as a muralist for film sets in Los Angeles. Currently, she maintains a fully sustainable artist practice creating assemblages containing at least 90% reclaimed materials such as paper products, metal, industrial wood, and produce netting. A 2017 solo exhibition at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center highlighted concerns about loss of natural habitat when bridges, interstates, and overpasses are constructed, and her 2020 Deer Humans show at The Studios of Key West focused on the Key deer’s fragile natural habitat and on Georgia and Florida’s endangered plants.
‘I will forever be a potter’
“Power Line Prairie, GA” 22.5″ x 46.5″ assemblage on wood by Lisa D. Watson
Watson prepared for her most recent solo show, Avant Gardener, by participating in research trips with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance, and the Longleaf Pine Alliance. Again heavily leaning into native plant education, the multi-sensory show toured for nine months from 2022 into 2023, starting in Arts Southeast’s Ellis Gallery in Savannah before moving to the Coastal Discovery Museum on Hilton Head, and the Averitt Center for the Arts and IAB Gallery at Georgia Southern in Statesboro. “Around mid-May of 2023, I picked up the last pieces from Georgia Southern,” Watson recalls. “I brought them home, wrapped them, and went, ‘OK, what was missing?’
“I had spread the word about our fragile ecosystems, but I didn’t feel accomplished personally. I was lacking something in my creative process. So, I called up Clair and a month later I was here in the hand-building studio relearning how to work with clay.”
Watson refers to Clair Buckner, proprietor of the magical, community-focused Clayer & Co Pottery Studio on Bonaventure Road in Thunderbolt. Watson continues, “I had not touched clay in 30 years. Back in college, I had studied under a Japanese American ceramic artist called Ban Kajitani who started a ceramic sculpture department. I came here and just started building and building in clay.”
And this was the creative spark that she had been missing. “I will forever be a potter,” she says with a smile.
Clayer & Co. is home to the hand-building studio as well as jewelry classrooms, a wheel classroom, a room for storing and applying glazes, kilns, a retail shop selling clays and pottery tools, and the fabulous Ology Gallery, curated by Buckner’s partner, Wendy Melton. It wasn’t long before Melton and Buckner asked Watson to have a show in that space.
Watson says, “I’ve spent almost a year and a half preparing.” The resulting Surroundings, Daydreaming in the Chaos, a solo show of her ceramics, mixed-media collages, and paintings, opens on Saturday, Feb. 1 and runs through March 8.
‘Daydreams of achieving balance between man-made infrastructure and wilderness’
Lisa D. Watson’s “I Said Replant” is a 9.5″x11″ assemblage of security envelopes, glue paste, ink, glitter and acrylic on cardboard
Watson’s work is imaginative and yearning, conveying a longing for environmental harmony and a vision for positive change.
She shows me a large black sculptural installation of debris and pollution. The title piece of the show, Daydreaming in the Chaos contains an army of ceramic Carolina gopher frogs, an endangered species, sitting in the mucky blackness and staring at a video Watson filmed of their ideal, boggy habitat. “This one’s a heart breaker.”
We look at the Garden Mates series of ceramic wild birds (and a bat!) she has seen in her Savannah backyard, and we examine collaged paintings chastising us with the ramifications of our lack of regard for our environment―a flooded street, a billboard by the edge of a South Carolina interstate―places infused with daydreams of achieving balance between man-made infrastructure and wilderness. Watson has “this incredible urge to document a strange little house on a busy street in LA, a grassy curve along a freeway interchange in Savannah, and my own backyard habitat.”
We look at an installation called Preserve portraying native pitcher plants that have been beautifully sculpted out of clay. Several of them are flowering and display surprisingly large yellow blooms.
‘People who made or are making a difference’
“Soil Saint #4: Jane,” Lisa D. Watson’s 14″x17″x7″ stoneware sculpture
Central to the exhibition of 43 new works is her Soil Saints series, five hand-built sculptures of beloved friends and family members. Bisque-fired clay gives each a suitably deep brown, soil color.
Three of the haloed saints are deceased: Her grandmother is portrayed holding a butterfly. “She died when my dad was three weeks old. I think about her a lot.”
Her grandfather, an Italian immigrant to Pittsburgh during the ’20s, is portrayed with his WW1 medal below a nest entwined with the red, green, and white colors of the Italian flag because “this is where he made his nest.” He wears overalls as “he was a big vegetable gardener.”
Writer and gardening enthusiast Jane Fishman is portrayed with seeds and a Sapphic vintage belt buckle “that I bet she would have loved. Jane and I really didn’t bond over gardening weirdly, as we gardened very differently. We became friends at a party when we both started dancing. She was the coolest.”
Watson continues, “These saints are people who made, or are making, a difference.”
One portrays Lisa Lord, a biologist and conservation programs director with the Longleaf Alliance, who works to restore wildlife populations for listed or at-risk species including gopher frog, gopher tortoise, and red-cockaded woodpecker. One is of her friend, Shane, who had a gardening business in LA and taught her about native plants.
As always, creative gallerist Wendy Melton had a vision for how to most creatively and impactfully install the work. As one enters the gallery, Watson has painted a mural depicting the LA fires―burning palm trees, the cutout silhouette of a man she saw on a newscast running into the flames to rescue a bunny (“I just lost it. I cried for an hour.”), and also the beauty of how she dreams our world can be.
But Watson is tired. Conservation advocacy work is exhausting. “Each person must make better decisions,” she believes. “I’m continuously thinking of ways to save our indigenous animals, flora, and the few remaining untouched wild areas…I guess until I see positive environmental changes by humans, I can’t really relax.”
Come to her show and help her carry that burden. It matters.
Lisa D. Watson’s show, Surroundings, Daydreaming in the Chaos, opens on Saturday, Feb. 1 at Ology Gallery located “around back” at 415 Bonaventure Road in Thunderbolt. (I’m still waiting for some signage.) The reception is from 5:30-8 p.m. and there is a closing reception on Saturday, March 8.
Follow Watson on Instagram @art.ldw and visit art-ldw.com.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: savannah ga artist champions native flora and fauna through new works