Congratulations to Elizabeth LaPides for placing as a Finalist in the 4th Edition!

WHO ARE YOU?

I was raised on the East Coast, and I did both my undergrad and my graduate studies in Boston, and I've always been really passionate about nature and the environment. It wasn't until I was in my undergraduate degree that I started taking environmental science classes which got me really into climate change, and my work has been centered around that since then.

I want to clarify something with you you said, East Coast. You were born in East Coast, can you clarify which states for people that don't live in the US?

I was born in Annapolis Maryland which is about 45 minutes outside of Washington DC and that's actually a big reason why I got into climate change as well. I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, which, when I was little, you could swim in! By the time I turned 15, you couldn't swim in it anymore; the whole bay has basically died, and the school that I went to growing up was very into “Save the Bay” which is this big foundation that they have in that area as well as planting oyster reefs and submerged aquatic vegetation - so they were very much drilling that. As kids, we used to be able to go set crab traps off the dock when we were little but like by the time I was 15, you couldn't do any of those things anymore because it was so critically wounded. I mean I guess people swim in it now but my best friend still lives in Maryland and she was saying, Yeah, I wouldn't go in it at all, you would come out with like a weird rash.

What initially interested you in the term “climate change”?

I think I've always had animals in my life so I've always just been connected through nature and through them and my family and I spent a lot of time traveling around the world when I was younger and I got to pick really extreme places; so we went to the jungles of Peru and the savannah in Africa and I would always like drag my poor mom and dad to these really tough places and just being able to access and see that wildlife was always super special to me. So, learning about environmental damages and climate change just took hold of me and I just haven't focused on anything else since.

How old were you exactly when you were choosing Africa, and all the other places?

I was 13 when I first went to the jungles of Peru. I went back there when I was 19 to work on biological research, and I was 15 when I went to Africa and I was 17 when I went to Brazil. I’m very, very fortunate that my family was able to take me to these places and that was a really fun and really good experience.

so that's your inspiration and your reason for going into climate change, what about photography specifically?

That's kind of, I think, more of an inherited trait in the family. My grandmother and my dad's side of the family - a lot of them are artists, and when I was a kid, they were just like here's a camera, so that's something I've always just had to use as a medium. So, I guess I didn't really like pick it; it kind of was picked for me. I just followed it that way and how I approach every new project is with a camera first.

you said that your grandmother and father’s side are all artists, did they do other mediums or projects at the media?

Yeah, my grandmother ran an art gallery for years out in Santa Fe, and definitely, her medium is architecture. She builds, decorates, and designs houses, and her nephew was a pretty well-known photographer, a lot of the more sculptural type. My aunt also did a lot of drawings and illustrations before she ran a gallery in New York for several years, and then she retired. She has a horse farm in Pennsylvania now. So it's just kind of like the large selection of very intense contemporary art has always been in my life. Do you know the artist, Sandy Scogan? She's an installation, photographer, and she's popular in the early 90s, and she made this installation of a cocktail party and everyone and everything is covered in Cheetos. It was super wild and I just remember being really little at my grandma's gallery and seeing the installation being put up. So when it came to creativity, I had a very unique intro to it.

Did you get exposure to other more traditional mediums like painting or drawing in that way?

Not until I went to high school and then undergrad did I have to do traditional drawing and painting courses. For me, understanding art was through the contemporary lens, so it was always whatever you can make, can be art.

Can you tell us about the inspiration behind “cOAL aSH”?

Those pieces are meant to be huge. Whenever I can print, I like to print them as tall as the wall so they're really supposed to engage the viewer in a very overwhelming sense, and the idea behind that piece is where I live in California. Just last year we had a really intense wildfire; it almost burned half my neighborhood down. It was massive. That's a very common thing in California - the wildfires, and so the part of the landscape in that picture is an area that was burned and that has kind of grown back. And then the other part of that is the coal ash ponds, The way they store the waste after burning coal is in these big ponds, and they're supposed to line them with something so the chemicals don't seep into the ground. Usually, Republican and conservative lawmakers will deregulate these ponds and one of the big ones is Duke Energy and North Carolina; they had several of these ponds along the cape river that needed to be drained and was supposed to be drained. But then, when Trump got into office he deregulated it and extended the draining period. And that year hurricane Florence hit, and all these ponds overflowed and flooded out into the Cape Fear River. I mean, these ponds are filled with arsenic, cadmium, lead like every terrible chemical you do not want in your water supply just in the water supply. And so it's just you, it's just a way to kind of look at the consequences of fossil fuels in a complete collage-like circle, you have anywhere from the negative side effects of how we burn and use coal to, then you know that heats up the atmosphere causing drier intense conditions, leading to like more wildfires. So, this piece really is about looking at the fact that we don't exist in a vacuum; everything we do as a society comes back as a whole. So this piece is just to look at that and how everything kind of affects each other.

When I look at your work from an artist's perspective, it looks like this very beautifully contemporary abstract piece of work. So it's not until you actually look at the title that you really start thinking about what is actually what's behind it, which makes it even more interesting. Is the abstract nature of it on purpose?

It absolutely was because a lot of this stuff is actually purposely abstracted and hidden from American citizens and people who are even living along the Cape Fear River who often question, why is the water silver now; they don't tell us, they try to hide this, there are no legal repercussions for this so it's the extent and damage of what climate change and burning these fossil fuels is doing is very abstracted in the American mindset. A lot of people don't understand how all of this rolls together and they and these lobbyists through these energy corporations purposely wanted it that way. BP Oil is behind the whole campaign of being like, look at your carbon footprint and what you're doing on the world. They set that up so they would not be like they would shift the focus off of them like the oil spill in the Gulf. And it's just like it's in part of the abstraction and like the beauty of it is, is like a lot of this stuff is out of our control and out of our hands to do, like it's, it's not really the individual who's responsible for fixing climate change, it's like 75 people on this earth who could do it. Yeah, who is in charge of most of the pollutants? So, this whole concept is so complex so overwhelming. It often is like fragmented in my brain and how I see it in, in the sense where it's just like I take this, this concept that's actually like very very abstract and I just try to like show it through that, and I get a lot of jokes that like when I was in graduate school about how they were like well where's like the hope and the positive message at the end of this and I'm like, I don't know.

This is such a hugely complex topic that I wonder, whether you're painting or drawing or doing photography, you look at your work and it's very difficult to see whether or not it's finished, or it's that's a complicated feeling, given your topic. Do you struggle with that a lot?

Oh yeah, there's a lot of pressure these days to be an activist for these sort of things, and I like to use my work to educate as much as possible but also the thing about activism sometimes is that they want you to be like the beacon of hope. And the energy to get through it is so unfortunate to look at a room of people and be like, we passed the tipping point, we're done. This is how the world's going to look now. Strap on your Mad Max outfits and let's go. I try to do as much as I can in my day to day not to be polluting and buying unnecessary things and, eat organically and try not to have chemicals around but I live in society, I have to have an iPhone, I have to have a computer, it's not really on me to fix this whole world; I feel my role as an artist to just kind of be like, let's try to look at the beauty in it, and the power in it and I talk about in my statement a lot like a lot of science fiction writers, who, who wrote about like the Manhattan Project and in that feeling of being like, when they created the atom bomb, like, oh my god What the hell have we done and I feel like we're kind of at that moment with climate change; we're a pretty powerful creature that we can destroy the whole thing that we need to live on. That's just so massive and overwhelming to think about actually.

Given the magnitude of this topic, do you have upcoming projects?

I just sent out a ton of film that I've shot over the past nine months up in because of the fire that burned through this beautiful old redwood forest that everyone from over the hill would come and hike and it was some of my favorite hiking. When I first moved here, 10 years ago, and now it's all like gone, but I've been out there almost every day for the past nine months, watching them go from the freshly burned forests to them. You know, there's a lot of management that comes with after these fires and how everyone in this neighborhood has really, you know, taken to really looking at this whole climate change on a much smaller scale because this was the first fire. We were evacuated for a month from our house up here, and the air was orange every day and it was really really scary and my whole neighborhood like we didn't have the firefighters that we normally had because they were so spread, then there were three other massive fires - one in San Jose and one up in Santa Rosa and our whole neighborhood was just like, alright, who's got bulldozers; who's got water tags; they really saved us. And so I've been working with the community, to get everyone's stories and photographing their homes and people whose homes burned down; I've been up there helping them, clearing out debris and taking pictures and documenting this whole process and to watch the forest, really go through this change. and forest fires are partly in nature to help the soil and everything through the forest, so I have images of it before it burned, while it was burning, right after it burned, and then this whole process; so I plan to stay in this area and just watch this whole forest come back to life.

Does your work then seem a lot like documentary photography and journalism photography as well for you?

It’s a lot of research base - I do a lot of research. Every day, all the time, constantly because there's just always stuff happening in the environment and stuff that I don't even have to go out and research like I will just get notifications from the neighborhood being like hey the water table dropped this load; no one’s around your house or anything, right?

I really start with the research and document really try to get the whole grasp on it, but the psychology of grappling with the weight of how this affects our lives is kind of the mode that I go into when I create my pieces because it's really hard to walk around every day knowing that the ecosystems around you are dying and changing and adapting to something completely different than what you're used to and it's only getting hotter and hotter every summer etc., so it's like, what is that doing to us mentally and how we then see nature, and that's why I think a lot of my work comes out abstract in this sort of collage because it's just so your brain does not want to just be like, yep, everything's dying that's fine - you know you would just be so depressed if that's how you viewed it, so it’s really fascinating to me to talk to people, listen to people on how they are interpreting how the climates going to change in the future. So that whole psychological aspect is definitely part of the abstraction. It goes from research to how we physically process this research and then that comes to the piece.

I’m going to ask you the last question in a couple of different layers. I'd actually like to ask your advice when it comes to your climate change research and then your advice with photography as well.

My advice for climate change research is to do it in small doses. Don't go on a Reddit scroll. Really! I would start with the basics. The other way I started was just reading the International Panel on Climate Research and at the end, they gave you around eight different scenarios of how bad or how good this [climate change] could go on a scale of one being we stopped the warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, and this is what's going to happen if we can stop it, versus, We don't do anything and let it run off track; this is what's going to happen. So it kind of gives you in a way a good sense of how you can kind of feel, how where you live and everything is going to change. It’s the way I like to approach the research is by looking at the factual problems that are literally happening and then try to find what people are doing about it and how they're mitigating it. Unfortunately, psychologically, to really fix climate change would be to reject capitalism on a total global scale, which would be changing the entire human mindset of how we exist in nature - going from using nature for our benefit to realizing that we are a part of the circle of it. So it's a huge massive shift. I highly recommend reading philosophies on human nature, while doing research on climate change.
Then, my advice on photography and being an artist in this medium is to never miss a chance. If some natural phenomenon is happening, never miss the chance to go see it. Even if it's terrifying like a fire, or as cool as the bioluminescent like algae coming in on the shores at night, like never miss a chance to see these things because you never know when it's going to change or not be around.
and I know my brother goes to Death Valley as much as he can and it's approximately 135 degrees there and he's like yeah I want to know what that heat feels like and I'm like, go for it. You got to embrace the way nature is going to change through all of this and never miss a chance to go see it.

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