Catherine Chalmers: Conifer Trees, Bark Beetles, and Fire

Catherine Chalmers’s debut Michigan exhibition Conifer Trees, Bark Beetles, and Fire is a visual exploration into the dramas unfolding in America’s western forests. Incorporating imagery and materials gathered during her many years of living and doing fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, Chalmers reveals the fragile interplay among trees, insects, and wildfire. 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. The subsequent loss of billions of trees continues to have substantial negative effects on water supplies, soil health, air quality, and biodiversity.

Conifer Trees, Bark Beetles, and Fire unveils 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 and visually stunning design also used by scientists to identify them. After first printing photographs depicting these alpine landscapes onto wood panels, Chalmers then carves the bark beetle patterns directly into their surfaces.

Fire Watercolors are created by mixing gum arabic and water with chunks of burnt trees collected during her many treks through wildfire-scorched landscapes. Chalmers incorporates vibrant watercolors to give the impression of the blaze, as if igniting the artwork. Over decades, the artist has witnessed these changes within alpine ecosystems.

Finally, Chalmers uses tree resin she collected from conifer trees to create representations of the mountain pine beetles themselves in the Tree Resin Paintings. Although the artist has never encountered the small and evasive bark beetle in the wild, its representation appears in her project through this unexpected method, as the artist depicts the beetle using the very material the tree uses to defend itself.

Beyond conversations about creative process and scientific method, Chalmers’s collaborations with insects and the natural world offer the opportunity to wonder and to be awed in a present day often fraught with anxiety. There is hopefulness in the meticulousness and the care shown in her research, fieldwork, and creative inquiries. There is ingenuity and surprise in the endless overlay of art and science, the seamlessness from one to the other ongoing.

Paradoxically, Chalmers’s view into small worlds prompts deeper awareness of our human imprint now indelible within the broader ecosystem. Rather than reductive or didactic, her work breeds connection, it moves us. It is future forward and expansive, both matter of fact and wildly imaginative. Chalmers's extraordinary practice inspires us in its acute examination of our relationships, human and otherwise, our impact, and our inevitable responsibilities in the big picture far beyond the limitations of our smaller selves.

–Amanda Krugliak, Arts Curator

Catherine Chalmers is the 2025 Jean Yokes Woodhead Visiting Artist at the Institute for the Humanities.