Liz Brindley : Garlic
NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
January 13-March 10, 2018
Events
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 6-9 pm
Printmaking Workshop: Saturday, January 27, 1-3 pm
Paper Making Workshop: Thursday, February 8, 7-9 pm
Morning Coffee: Monday, February 19th, 9-11 am
Closing Reception & Recipe Swap: Saturday, March 10th, 6-9 pm
“At the end of the day, I just want to be covered in ink and soil,” Liz Brindley says. This may not be too difficult a feat when you take into account how many hats she wears on a weekly basis: farmer, artist, writer, art educator, printmaker, community organizer. No Land’s next exhibition is Garlic, an artist residency that incorporates all facets of Brindley’s practice as a creator, educator, and cultivator. Opening with an artist reception on Saturday, January 13th from 6-9 pm, Garlic features Brindley’s drawings, prints, a wall-sized mural, and installations of garlic skins, soil, and a kitchen-like space. Through Garlic’s two-month run time, Brindley will host workshops and other events at No Land centered on both art-making and food, hoping to provide spaces for honest dialogue about local agriculture, food justice and creativity.
You should hear Liz Brindley talk about garlic. “It’s so underappreciated,” she says. “It’s in just about everything we eat, and yet it’s so precious.” As garlic is planted in autumn, it grows underground through the winter until harvest in early summer. Of all that is harvested, half of the crop gets replanted when fall comes again. To Brindley, this precious practice of cultivating garlic is the perfect metaphor for the naturally occurring cycles within people that we tend to ignore. “You know, humans are supposed to follow the cycles of the seasons, too,” Brindley points out. “The land slows down and rests in the winter, and maybe this is also a time for us to slow down and reflect.”
This past fall, right around the time that garlic-planting season was beginning, she discovered The Garlic Testament by local farmer and author Stanley Crawford. She credits this book for awakening a new fascination with the vegetable. As a tribute to it, Brindley and No Land will put out an open call for more used garlic skins, which will be integrated into an installation within the gallery, and later in a paper-making workshop on Thursday, February 8th that will incorporate the skins into the fiber of the paper.
Born in Oklahoma City, Brindley went to school at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she studied photography and printmaking and majored in Studio Art and Art History. After graduating in 2015, she undertook a nine-month artist residency through the school that saw her exploring her connection with land and food through installation and performance. In 2016, after finishing school, Brindley landed in Santa Fe after travelling down the West Coast. She quickly became involved with Santa Fe’s agricultural community, working at various farms and as a farmer’s assistant at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. Last year after the presidential election, Brindley started the Creative Activists Network, seeking to foster connections between creatives in order to promote equality, justice and positive social change through collaboration. “It feels good to put roots down,” she says; “to build something that I hope will connect people to the land through creative practice, and to each other through dialogue about food and art. I still have a lot to learn here.”
Central to Brindley’s practice is her background in education. Her recently developed printmaking workshops – which she’s developed this spring and turned into her own business, Prints & Plants – involve the printing of cross-sections of produce found at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. Brindley will direct a similar workshop at No Land on Saturday, January 27th.
Brindley ultimately hopes to bring this kind of art-making to people outside of the local agricultural community, and art community for that matter. Her collaborative spirit is vital to her notion of how artists, and everyday people, can change the world. “How do we reacquaint ourselves with and learn to see the value in things that are here every day,” she wonders, “before we can’t take them for granted anymore?”
Workshops
Relief Printmaking
$30 | 2 hours
Learn the process of relief printmaking in this hands-on workshop where you will learn to carve your own veggie-inspired stamp and create a series of prints to take home.
Papermaking
$30 | 2 hours
Learn how to make paper using recycled materials and garlic skins! The paper we create will be used as recipe cards to take home and give away at the "Garlic" Closing Reception.
Artist Statement
“One of the singular characteristics of garlic is that it makes you wait.”
- Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament
Garlic. The foundation of any nourishing meal. The ubiquitous nature of this produce shadows the time and energy required for its growth. One clove planted in the fall hibernates beneath frozen ground for seven to nine months to create a head of ten, maybe fifteen, cloves. Compare this to a single tomato seed that takes approximately three months to produce fruit that, when cut open, can provide hundreds of seeds. Garlic takes its time. It makes us wait. It teaches us patience and serves as a mirror for how to move inward in our own lives, shed old layers, and grow ourselves.
Garlic shares the quiet beauty of this essential veggie through the spaciousness that comes with waiting to create moments of peaceful reflection and faith. Can we dive deep to ask ourselves who we truly are and who we are becoming? Can we rest into the discomfort of unknowns until they become comfortable? Can we slow down to trust that, after all of the silence, harvest will come and with it, answers?
Bio
Liz Brindley is a Santa Fe printmaker and illustrator who makes artwork about food to increase awareness of the interconnection of humans and the land. Liz owns and operates Prints & Plants, a mobile art and ecology workshop that travels around New Mexico to teach about local agriculture through printmaking and drawing activities.
Liz received her BA in Studio Art and Art History at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 2015. She went on to participate in an Emerging Artist Residency at St. Olaf where she focused on ecologically-centered participatory and performance art. She moved to Santa Fe in 2016 after dreaming of living here since she was a kid. In Santa Fe, her artwork has been shown at Warehouse 21, Show Pony, and numerous pop-up markets.