Grace Emmet is both an artist and curator of community education at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She’s a close observer of nature and maintains an ecologically sustainable art practice, using her images to explore humans’ relationship to the natural world. She has had recent exhibitions at Zone7a Gallery in Provincetown and Farm Projects in Wellfleet, and her work is included in the current Members’ Juried Exhibition at PAAM. —Abraham Storer
Q: What inspired this image?
I took a walk around Fort Hill in early fall 2023, during the change of the season. It was sort of magical. It was just becoming dusk, so birds were still out, but bats were starting to flutter around, and the goldenrod was swaying in the wind. It was a really beautiful scene.
I went home and I did a sketch of it, and it got lost in my sketchbook. Last winter, I was flipping through my sketchbook looking for ideas, and I came across it and decided to make it into a bigger image.
Q: What was it like to translate the initial sketch into this larger work?
I wasn’t taking it too seriously. I was messing around with walnut ink and vine charcoal, and it became this playful, fun image. The process was different from my typical way of working. It was just something I made for myself. I made it during the quiet months when there was no expectation, no one was going to look at it, and it wasn’t for anything. It’s so important for artists to have these kinds of experiences.
Q: You do a lot of work based on your observations of nature and you also forage for natural materials to make ink. How do the seasons affect your studio life?
In the summer and shoulder seasons, there’s a lot more going on out in the natural world, so I create a lot of sketches and ideas that I don’t get to realize. Winter allows me to go back and revisit those ideas and moments and start turning them into something or to meditate on a passing thought that I might have had earlier in the year.
I spend a lot of the year gathering materials, preparing them, turning them into inks, and then the winter is an opportunity to use the materials and make work but also to prepare plans for the year ahead.
Q: Have you noticed anything interesting in nature lately?
I love going out in the winter. It’s not as easy to bring my sketchbook, but there’s still so much life and unexpected things that you can find. The other day, after a fresh snowfall, I made a point to go out early in the morning and look for animal tracks. Normally you think of animals hiding in the winter. You don’t really see them as much, but I saw tracks from fisher cats, coyotes, and rabbits. There’s still so much life around.
