Catherine Chalmers: Conifer Trees, Bark Beetles, and Fire

Catherine Chalmers’s debut Michigan exhibition Conifer Trees, Bark Beetles, and Fire delves into the dramas unfolding in America’s western forests. With imagery and materials gathered during her many years of living and doing fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, she reveals the fragile interplay among trees, insects, and wildfire. Chalmers’s visual language is both stunning and unsettling—a meditation on the forces reshaping alpine ecosystems.

Beetle infestations and wildfires have long played a beneficial role within alpine forests, helping to foster tree renewal. However, climate change and human mismanagement have resulted in increased beetle populations and higher-intensity wildfires, a combination that has become a driver of devastation, resulting in the loss of billions of trees and severely affecting water supplies, soil health, air quality, and biodiversity.

The exhibition will include innovative work in three different media. Beetle Carvings represent the destructive patterns of bark beetles engraved into conifer trees. Each of the hundreds of beetle species creates a unique design, which scientists use to identify them. After first printing photographs depicting these devastated alpine landscapes onto wood panels, Chalmers then carves the bark beetle patterns into their surfaces.

Fire Watercolors are created by mixing chunks of burnt trees collected during her many treks with gum arabic and water to create a charcoal-like substance. After hours of work in the studio, Chalmers incorporates vibrant watercolors to give the impression of the blaze, as if igniting the artwork. The work evolved from her many hikes through scorched landscapes that have been impacted by megafires.

Finally, Chalmers uses sap and resin she collected from conifer trees to create representations of the mountain beetles themselves in the Sap Paintings. Although she has never encountered the small and evasive bark beetle in the wild, their representation appears in her project through this unexpected method. This allows Chalmers to depict the beetle using the very material the tree uses to defend itself.

This deeply personal project aims to explore the intricate relationship between beetles, wildfires and trees, while shedding light on the broader consequences of human actions on forest ecology. By revealing both the beauty and the tragedy within these natural processes, Chalmers hopes to inspire a deeper understanding and appreciation of the complexities of environmental conservation and the vital role art plays in conveying these insights.

Catherine Chalmers holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited her artwork around the world, including MoMA P.S.1; MASSMoCA; The Drawing Center, New York; Kunsthalle Vienna; Today Art Museum, Beijing; among others. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, ArtNews and Artforum. She has been featured on PBS, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. Two books have been published on her work: FOOD CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004). Her video “Safari” received a Jury Award (Best Experimental Short) at SXSW Film Festival in 2008. In 2010 Chalmers received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2015 she was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency. In 2018 she created the course “Art & Environmental Engagement” and taught it at Stanford University. Her video “Leafcutters” won Best Environmental Short at the 2018 Natourale Film Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany; in 2019 it won the Gil Omenn Art & Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives in New York City.