ARTIST STATEMENT
As a mother and artist, I make connections between humans and the more-than-human world through the labor of stitching. In my work, the seed becomes both material and metaphor: a carrier of memory and a site of regenerative possibility. Here stitching is literal and symbolic labor—an embodied act that holds wounding and healing in the same space. Through stitching, I examine how motherhood, land use, and colonial systems shape one another, and how care can become a radical, restorative force.
Through small game hunting and the incorporation of rabbit fur in works like Deconstructed Care, I engage directly with life cycles often obscured by industrial food systems. My family participates in this process: we eat the meat, touch the soft fur, and share in grief for the animal’s life. These materials speak to the complex, non-symbolic entanglements between human and non-human systems. Resilience here is participation—messy, accountable, and intimate.
I investigate my family’s relationship to place through material practice, understanding motherhood as an institution shaped by colonial extraction and agricultural industry. Seeds teach another model: they store ancestral knowledge, adapt to shifting conditions, and entangle with the roots of all life on the prairie. Through acts of stitching and seed-saving, I explore my responsibility within cycles of damage and repair. My work offers no simple solution, instead, it proposes resilience as a collective, rooted process—threads hold together root systems underground—where healing emerges slowly through reciprocity, storytelling, and shared labor.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Marian Lyndgaard is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates interspecies relationships as a way to challenge and soften the boundaries we place between ourselves, other beings, and the spaces we inhabit. Their practice moves between visual art and community engagement, through a mending circle gathering driven by a desire to mend not only materials, but also the frayed connections within our social fabric. The prairie ecosystem where she lives is critically endangered, with less than one percent of native prairie remaining. The chemicals sprayed on corn and soybean fields around her childhood home in Iowa are linked to those used in warfare, collapsing the boundaries between battlefield and farmland. In this way, seeds are now being trapped in a contradictory inheritance of nourishment and harm. Her prairie restoration and stitching efforts physically and metaphorically represent the feminine deconstruction of the grid. Personally understanding the native prairie milkweed plant has transformed from being a weed to eradicate, to a relationship between species. Collecting seeds and spreading them with her children begins to rebuild a broken connection from a settler colonial industrial farming past to a resilient future of care. They hold an MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in Art from College of St. Benedict in MN focused in Studio Art and Art Education with a minor in Education.
© Marian Lyndgaard