Article and film first appear on PlantPop, Dec 2022: https://plantpop.com/blog/2022/11/9/juniper-harrower-environmental-artist
By Bettina Hanna
Many artists love showcasing plants in their work, emphasizing the natural beauty of the world through their art. However, not many have intertwined them so deeply as artist Juniper Harrower.
“I grew up in the desert near Joshua Tree…The plants were just kind of a part of our world and our community. And so that started really young.”
Juniper’s art and ecological journeys are closely intertwined. She studied plant biology in undergrad, and then started intertwining that with art once she started pursuing her Ph.D. in ecology. This shows in how much she emphasizes the scientific side of things in her art.
“The freedom and the other ways of knowing plants and communities that I get to have as an artist is just much more resonant with my kind of my being.”
Because of this meeting of passions, Juniper’s process often bounces between the scientific and the artistic for a while before her work is fully developed.
“Spend some time, often in nature, kind of troubling or exploring the idea. And then I do a dive into research and tease it out a little bit more. And then I'm thinking visually. And so there's this back and forth as part of my research process.”
Watch film here