On Sunday, April 26, seven Philadelphia artists will open up their studios, inviting the public to see how they’ve paired art and science in the LandLab artist residency at the Schuylkill Center. But these studios aren’t buildings, aren’t indoors at all.

For the LandLab residents, the Center’s fields and forests have been both studio and laboratory for the past year as the artists grapple with how environmental art can address local ecological issues. At the Schuylkill Center, managing our forests presents seemingly insurmountable obstacles: invasive species, deer that overgraze the forest and remove native wildflowers, erosion from increasingly large storms, and the myriad impacts of climate change.

But these challenges present an opportunity to develop creative approaches that produce novel outcomes. The LandLab residency represents a new frontier in environmental art and land stewardship, offering creative ways to respond to these pressing problems. The 2014-2015 LandLab residents, artist group Marguerita Hagan, B.H. Mills, and Maggie Mills; Leslie Birch; Jake Beckman; and botanist-artist duo WE THE WEEDS (Zya Levy and Kaitlin Pomerantz), have been hard at work researching, thinking, and making their installations.

In this first offering of the residency, some of the artists have turned their focus on pollinator populations, others have looked at encroaching invasive plants, another at stormwater damage. Each artist, or group of artists, has dedicated countless hours creating art that both restores the land and educates the public.

As part of the Philadelphia Science Festival on April 26th, starting at 1:00 p.m., LandLab artists will lead a walk to the completed installations and talk about how they developed the installations and how the pieces mitigate, remediate, or restore the land around them. Scientific experts (including collaborators on the artists’ projects) will join the conversation to offer ecological context.

This will be the public unveiling of their completed works, and the only opportunity to hear directly from the artists about their work. LandLab residents have the space and time to explore and experiment. The residencies unfold over a full year, allowing artists to see the site over all seasons, try out ideas, and see how natural processes respond to their work.

The 2014-2015 LandLab artists also transformed audiences from passive observers to active participants. Visitors molded clay bees, harvested and wove with invasive vines, and prototyped technology solutions. In addition to the interventions on the Schuylkill Center site, Drawing Conclusions is a gallery show at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists that reveals more of the process to create the works and how the time creating art in nature impacted their artistic practice.

The reception for this exhibition will be on April 30 from 5-7pm, with artist talks at 6pm. Though their residencies are technically coming to an end, it will be months, even years, before we fully know what impact these installations have had. Mushrooms will grow, stormwater will continue to run past sensors, bees will visit the pollinator garden, and new invasive plants will consume the vine sculptures. Join us on Sunday to see this ending which is also a beginning, and stay with us to see what happens from here. More information about the programs discussed above can be found here.