Listening to the Land: Reimagining the Bartram Trail
Listening to the Land is a visual exploration of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail that features the photography of thirty-two artists. The photographs featured in this resonant and varied exhibition celebrate the region's rich biodiversity while honoring each person’s unique relationship with the land.
Listening to the Land:
Reimagining the Bartram Trail
Listening to the Land is a visual exploration of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail that features the photography of thirty-two artists. The photographs featured in this resonant and varied exhibition celebrate the region's rich biodiversity while honoring each person’s unique relationship with the land.
Drawing inspiration from Bartram’s Travels and the enduring wisdom of land-based and indigenous peoples of this region, photographers entered an intimate world where the landscape was alive and waiting to be met, understood, and listened to. This exhibition invites you to contemplate your own wild origins while visually reimagining a time when humans moved in respect, harmony, and co-creative kinship with the natural world.
April McNiff
Life Along the Bartram
Archival Inkjet Print
18” x 24”
Susan Patrice
Roundabout #1
Film caputured 360 degree panoramic; scanned and printed on archival inkjet paper
32” Diameter Circle
The Shape of Summer Cyanotype Installation Participants:
Shawn McIntosh
Angela Martin
Anne Cannon
Brent Martin
Drew Jorgensen
Liliana Vitale
Lu Mann
Starlett Henderson
Barron Northrup
Sandy Johnson
Yvonne Dalschen
The Franklin Greenway Installation Participants:
Anna Helgeson
Casey Visco
Kaoly Gutierrez
Kaye Savage
Laura Rudkin Miniot
Lisa Howell
Lynne Buchanan
Mike Belleme
Yvonne Dalschen
With Rapture and Astonishment at UGA Circle Gallery
This dynamic exhibition reflects the visual experiences of twelve artists as they traveled in Bartram’s footsteps. Each artist worked in the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and wonder while reimagining this well-traveled landscape. Featuring images from coastal Georgia to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, With Rapture & Astonishment invites viewers to enter an intimate world where Bartram’s trail is alive and waiting to be met and listened to anew.
With Rapture and Astonishment
Reimagining the Bartram Trail
June 24th–September 12th, 2023
Circle Gallery
UGA College of Environment + Design
285 South Jackson Street, Athens, Georgia
Public Reception: Saturday, August 5th, 3 - 6 pm
The Circle Gallery is open 9am–5pm weekdays.
Parking is available in the North Campus Deck, 330 South Jackson Street
With Rapture & Astonishment is a photography exhibition that takes its name from a quote by American artist, botanist, and ethnographer William Bartram, which he made upon reaching the summit of Wayah Bald in May of 1775. Here he “beheld with rapture and astonishment, a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence….”
This dynamic exhibition reflects the visual experiences of twelve artists as they traveled in Bartram’s footsteps. Each artist worked in the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and wonder while reimagining this well-traveled landscape. Featuring images from coastal Georgia to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, With Rapture & Astonishment invites viewers to enter an intimate world where the trail is alive and waiting to be met and listened to anew.
A public reception for With Rapture and Astonishment will be held Saturday, August 5th, 3 - 6 pm in conjunction with the 2023 Bartram Trail Conference.
About the Photographers:
The photographers featured in this exhibition embraced Bartram's exploratory spirit and cultivated curiosity, and humility while reimagining this ancient and well-traveled landscape. Many of the photographers featured here drew inspiration and guidance from the place-based traditions of diverse indigenous peoples, including The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who have stewarded this land for millennia and who freely shared their plant knowledge and wisdom with William Bartram.
Featured artists include:
The Circle Gallery is named for the holistic nature of design and seeks to present exhibits that engender curiosity and increase our powers of observation. Because our college is comprised of diverse programs—landscape architecture, historic preservation and environmental planning and design—our exhibits run an eclectic gamut. From paintings and drawings, to sculpture and photography, to cultural and historical presentations, we explore humanity’s place within nature.
Community Partners
With Rapture and Astonishment is a community collaboration facilitated by the Kinship Photography Collective in partnership with the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy, Bartram Trail Conference, The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts, and the Circle Gallery at the University of Georgia.
Meanderings: Instances of Wandering
This collection of photographs were made by students at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina and selected by Anna Helgeson and Susan Martin. Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester students interacted with Kinship in multiple ways including workshops, lectures, and photo responses to recorded gatherings. The end result is a diverse collection reflecting the multitude of ways that one can approach our relationships to each other and the natural world.
Meanderings: Instances of Wandering
Western Carolina University Students
Meanderings: Instances of Wandering is a collection of photographs made by students at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. The images were selected by Anna Helgeson and Susan Martin from final portfolios submitted for the Photo II and Introduction to Digital Photography classes. Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester these students interacted with the Kinship Photography Collective in multiple ways including through workshops, lectures, and photo responses to recorded gatherings. The end result is a diverse collection reflecting the multitude of ways that one can approach our relationships to each other and the natural world.
Aubrey Sanderson
Berlyn Perdomo
Jenna Humphries
Anna Riddle
Bell Hosanna
Max Collins
Amy Morgan
Amy Woods
Emily Ingham
Jessica Rial
Erin Elsey
Jessica Butner
Ellie Little
Elijah Hawkins
MacKenzie Neely
Rachel Gelabale
Naomi Michelle
Katie Barnett
William Vanderslice
Roy Torda
Natasha Sturdivant
Featured Photographers:
Aubrey Sanderson
Berlyn Perdomo
Jenna Humphries
Anna Riddle
Bell Hosanna
Max Collins
Amy Morgan
Amy Woods
Emily Ingham
Jessica Rial
Erin Elsey
Jessica Butner
Ellie Little
Elijah Hawkins
MacKenzie Neely
Rachel Gelabale
Naomi Michelle
Katie Barnett
William Vanderslice
Roy Torda
Natasha Sturdivant
Seeing the Land With New Eyes
The photographers featured in this online gallery were participants in a six-week online contemplative photography class offered through The Rowe Center. Using whatever cameras they had available, photographers of all levels were invited to enter an intimate world where the landscape was alive and waiting to be met, understood, and listened to. The resulting photographs are full of subtle grace, beauty, tenderness, and co-creative vulnerability.
Paul Wanta
Seeing the Land With New Eyes
Contemplative Photography at The Rowe Center
In the face of climate threat, many of us long to make a difference, especially if we are empathetic and caring people. And yet, sometimes, it feels like our gifts of sensitivity and compassion are not enough. But shifting perspectives can change everything.
What if our climate crisis is actually a crisis of intimacy? Our sensitivity would be our greatest gift and our capacity for connection would help us transform our relationships with the natural world and each other. Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Overstory, believes “the ecological crisis we are now facing is a direct and inevitable consequence of human separatism that has created a culture in which great, teeming, reciprocal communities of living things have become nothing but commodities that we use with impunity—as if somehow the very cycles of interdependence were no longer something that we had to answer to.” But answer we must.
Transforming our relationships with the more-than-human world requires new ways of seeing and responding. And in this precarious moment, photography has something powerful to offer. The camera you carry in your pocket or bag is an extraordinary tool for cultivating connection, kinship, and belonging. Photography is, after all, a medium of relationship, where images are made in direct and open contact with the world. When photography practices include contemplative values such as humility, curiosity, and wonder, the natural world comes alive with luminous generosity and co-creative power. Even the most familiar and wounded places radiate with beauty and grace.
I recently experienced a remarkable example of how powerful photography can be while working with students at The Rowe Center who attended a Contemplative Photography: Seeing the Land with New Eyes online workshop. Using whatever cameras they had available, photographers of all levels were invited to enter an intimate world where the landscape was alive and waiting to be met, understood, and listened to. Each photographer chose a familiar place close to home. Then, using contemplative practices designed to deepen their connection to place, they carved out a unique and personal space for love to blossom. Each responded in their own way to what arose. The resulting photographs were full of subtle grace, beauty, tenderness, and co-creative vulnerability.
Their photographs remind me that photography matters now more than ever. Whether you call it the Anthropocene or the sixth great extinction, restoring a thriving planet requires cultural and collective reimagining, and photography, when practiced well, can positively shape and change how we see and relate to the world around us and, more importantly, who we become in that world. Here, photography is more than an act of discovery; it is a vital reminder of a tender beauty that connects us one to the other when the world is seen through the eyes of the heart.
Recently the Dali Lama was asked what it would take to turn the tide of climate change. He believed that “increasing our awareness of the undeniable interconnections between us and the natural world, paired with our own lived experiences of Earth’s capacity—and our own capacity—for transformation, change, and healing, could be the most powerful force.”
The photographs featured in this online gallery are evidence of this powerful and yet tender force. They remind us that falling in love with the world (just as it is) changes everything. In love, our actions spring from reverence and are informed by our deep kinship with the living earth and each other. In love, our photographs testify to our own transformative journey and act as beautiful and reciprocal gifts that we pay forward into the world as gestures of gratitude.
— Susan Patrice, April 2023
LaDana Hintz
Elaine Brooks
Catherine Barritt
Elaine Brooks
Catherine Barritt
Elaine Brooks (left) & Janet Grimes (right)
Catherine Barritt
Catherine Barritt
Janet Grimes
Janet Grimes
Janet Grimes
LaDana Hintz
LaDana Hintz
LaDana Hintz
Elaine Brooks
Susan Beaumont
Susan Beaumont
LaDana Hintz
Catherine Barritt
Paul Wanta
Susan Beaumont
Paul Wanta
Susan Beaumont
Janet Grimes
Susan Beaumont
Paul Wanta
Paul Wanta
Featured Photographers:
Catherine Barritt
Elaine Brooks
Janet Grimes
LaDana Hintz
Susan Beaumont
Upcoming Rowe Center Workshops & Retreats
September 22nd - 24th 2023
The Spirit of Place: A Contemplative Photographic Journey.
Photographers of all levels (camera phones are welcome) are invited to join Susan Patrice for a contemplative photographic journey. Together we will explore the spirit of the magical place that is Rowe. Nestled in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains and surrounded by wooded hiking trails, lakes, and trickling streams, we will celebrate the visual wonders of nature while finding creative and spiritual nourishment within this protected and loved landscape. As we practice together, our photographs will come alive with new meaning and beauty. We hope you can join us for this dynamic and inspiring workshops.
With Rapture and Astonishment
The eleven photographers featured in this exhibition reflected upon the same five-mile section of the Bartram National Recreation Trail for twelve weeks between Osage Overlook and Jones Gap near Highlands, NC. Many of the photographers featured here drew inspiration and guidance from William Bartram and the place-based traditions of diverse indigenous peoples, including The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who have stewarded this land for millennia and who freely shared their wisdom with William Bartram.
Eric William Carroll, Bramble, 11/20/22
With Rapture and Astonishment
A Listening to the Land Photography Project Exhibition
With Rapture & Astonishment is inspired by a quote from American artist, botanist, and ethnographer William Bartram, which he made upon reaching the summit of Wayah Bald in May of 1775. Here he “beheld with rapture and astonishment, a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, mountains piled upon mountains.” This quote from his 1791 publication Travels, is representative of the language used by Bartram to describe the southern backcountry he explored from 1773 to 1777, language that is described by historians as the first genuine and artistic interpretation of the American landscape by a Colonial American, and elevated it into the realm of the sublime.
This was the eve of the American Revolution, and the colonial American landscape was in the midst of great transformation during this time, with conflicts and tensions between settlers and native people on the increase. Bartram, however, was a Quaker, and his pacifism and respect for native peoples is palpable in his writings. Cherokee language scholar Tom Belt remarked that William Bartram would have been the first white man in Cherokee country that was not there to trade, convert, or swindle. Instead, he was there to observe and learn about plant life in the area and Cherokee customs and traditions. Travels could be described as a heeding as well, as it revealed Bartram’s humility before nature and his deep respect for indigenous peoples, which was in direct contrast with the conquest mentality of Colonial America at the time.
The photographs in this seek to interpret the landscape in the spirit of Bartram. The works invite us to respond with humility in a recognition of the sublime that we can access should we only stop, observe, and be present with what the natural world has to offer. Perhaps as we humans continue to dominate the planet with our demands upon it we need the experience of the sublime more than ever. Perhaps this will center us in our insignificance within the great scheme of biodiversity and evolution and humble us before all of creation.
-Brent Martin
Executive Director, Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy
Books & Installations
Erik Mace, With August Majesty and Power
Frances Bukovsky, Between Earth and Sky
Brent Martin & Susan Patrice, An Infinite Variety
Yvonne Dalchen, Bartram Blaze
Puc Puggy Loop
Southeast Conservation Corp, Trail Workers
The Bascom, Bunzl Gallery Views
About the Photographers:
The photographers featured in this exhibition reflected upon the same five-mile section of the Bartram National Recreation Trail for twelve weeks between Osage Overlook and Jones Gap near Highlands, NC. These eleven Kinship Photography Collective members embraced Bartram's exploratory spirit and cultivated curiosity, and humility while reimagining this ancient and well-traveled landscape. Many of the photographers featured here drew inspiration and guidance from the place-based traditions of diverse indigenous peoples, including The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who have stewarded this land for millennia and who freely shared their plant knowledge and wisdom with William Bartram.
With Rapture and Astonishment was on view in the Bunzl Gallery at The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts, December 15th, 2022 - January 6th, 2023. See the full gallery guide with artist bios and image sizes here.