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Marion Wilson wanted to find a use for the food compost that she collected in her Manhattan apartment at the beginning of the pandemic. Because the fear of food scarcity weighed on her mind, she began freezing her compost and photographing it.

One experiment brought Wilson to freeze watermelon rinds and photograph them in an effort to make the food look more geological and biological looking. She wanted to make the rind look like it had green veins.

Wilson was recently selected to be one of the January artists-in-residence for Light Work, a nonprofit photography organization in Syracuse. As part of the residency, she’s working on multimedia pieces that utilize compost and that are “like human, food and Earth all in one,” Wilson said.

Since artists and curators can’t work together in interactive spaces due to the pandemic, Wilson has been collaborating with the Light Work staff over Zoom and creating the pieces out of a studio in her friend’s home in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Much of Wilson’s artistic inspiration is derived from her childhood, during which she helped photograph her father throughout his political career as a New York state senator in the mid-60s. Despite growing up in New York City, Wilson traveled upstate with her family to Albany every summer, a place where she was happiest.

“I loved being out in the landscape,” Wilson said. “There’s a profound sense of freedom.”

Wilson pursued photography while in college and eventually earned a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University. She then received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, and later, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati.

But Wilson’s love for ecology never left her. A recent project she created in 2020 made her revisit lakes, streams and other bodies of water from her childhood in New Jersey, New York and Virginia. For the project, titled “Waters of my Childhood,” she collected bottles of water to photograph, which included algae blooms and pollution to show how unswimmable the water is today.

Wilson is interested in looking at ecology through a human lens. Revisiting those places created deep, pleasurable memories, but she also left feeling sad, having noticed how pollution has negatively affected those landscapes.

“I’m not romantic about the landscape,” she said. “It’s more the ways that humans have interacted with it.”

Wilson has been a lab member for Light Work since 1995. Courtesy of Steve Sartori

Cjala Surratt, the communications coordinator of Light Work, chose Wilson to be one of the organization’s January artists-in-residence because Wilson is unique for her look at eco-landscape and how humans interact with and are impacted by the natural world.

Wilson’s focus on studying, freezing and analyzing food waste is interesting to Surratt. It shows where people are in society through re-examining and questioning things that humans do every day, she said.

“What she is giving to the community is resilience,” Surratt said. “I think that the gift that she is giving is an opportunity for mental respite, which I think is profound and quite appreciated.”

Wilson also isn’t new to Syracuse University, as she taught a class called “New Directions in Social Sculpture” at SU from 2007 to 2017. Additionally, she’s helped create several art projects for the Syracuse community, including the Mobile Literacy Arts Bus, a mobile art lab, and 601 Tully, a local art museum and education center.

Now pursuing her residency at Light Work, Wilson and Dan Boardman, the nonprofit’s lab manager, have been connecting every day and working on her compost pieces.

The two meet over the phone once or twice a day and discuss Wilson’s artwork digitally. And since he has been helping Wilson over Zoom, Boardman sometimes controls Wilson’s screen to help guide her through Photoshop.

“We’ve already sort of established a good working relationship remotely,” Boardman said. “Now that she’s started her residency, it’s much of the same.”

When they are finished digitally editing the photos, Boardman ships printed images back to Martha’s Vineyard so Wilson can paint on the physical copies and make further adjustments.

This residency is an opportunity for Wilson to explore and try new things within her artistic career, Boardman said.

“She has a lot happening and has a very intuitive process, and lets the process evolve in front of her,” Boardman said.

Published on January 14, 2021 at 11:36 pm

racramer@syr.edu