Future Artifacts

Celeste Shimoura Goedert (b. 1995) an emerging artist who grew up on unceded Anishinaabe land colonially known as Southeast Michigan. Employing primarily printmaking and drawing techniques, her work is a tactile meditation on remembrance and resilience. Celeste received a B.A. in Social Theory & Practice from the University of Michigan in 2017. Her work has appeared at the Detroit Historical Museum, the University of Michigan Matthei Botanical Gardens, and in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. 

“As a mixed race person with Japanese with Irish heritage, my work is rooted in my family’s encounters with assimilation and the desire to experience belonging. My artistic inquiry explores the historic and sociological ghosts that haunt us; I seek to find meaning in the liminal spaces between cultural amnesia, grief, and resistance to the pervasive forces of capitalism. My work for Future Artifacts is inspired by cenotaphs and shrines. Interconnecting signifiers of Japanese American, Irish, and Palestinian sites shaped by violence and resistance, it is an attempt to memorialize places impacted and lost to war and displacement. In doing so, I hope to invoke a reflection on the varied yet synchronous ways in which communities navigate the possibility of resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable loss.” 

Eliza Guion (b. 1997) is a visual artist, writer, and educator from Abenaki territory (Vermont, USA). Through textile, print, and sculpture works formed with abundant and discarded materials, she explores land histories and possibilities. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Colorado College, completed a weaving concentration at the Penland School of Craft, and has worked in community food access and local agriculture for many years. Her work has been exhibited at MUNKA Studio, An Chéad Tine Gallery, and published in Quare Éire. 

“My research is led by an instinctive interest in material; I am largely focused on working with weedy or abundant plants and waste stream objects. In doing so, I question how attending with care to overgrowing, undesirable, or polluting material might shape perceptions of home, place, and belonging. This practice is a way of responding to my own deep grief and overwhelm in the face of climate crisis and settler un-belonging. While collaborating with various media, I ground myself in textile handicraft traditions and the frameworks of care, maintenance, and repair that they exemplify. My work in Future Artifacts approaches wild pigments as teachers who have much to say about human impacts; colonial occupation, settlement, agricultural development, and more. Woven into patchy and ongoing maps of place and relationship, they are the navigational tools that I have assembled as I orient myself towards futures of mutual flourishing.”

Genevieve Moberly (b. 1998) is a painter whose practice explores speculative futures through the languages of myth, art history, science fiction, and animal mysticism. Holding a BFA from the Maine College of Art & Design (Portland, Maine, United States), she is currently pursuing an MA from the Burren College of Art (Co. Clare, Ireland). Moberly’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including at Nightshade Contemporary, WREN Gallery, and the ICA at MECAD. She works in oil, watercolor, and gouache and lends each medium to depicting densely botanical and reimagined landscapes. 

“I am interested in the dynamics of interspecies relationships, symbiosis, biological mimicry, and the ways in which animal mysticism has manifested across global art histories and mythologies, particularly those found within depictions of utopian and Edenic landscapes. My current body of work hypothesizes an alternate, reparative reality in the face of increasing environmental disasters, political unrest, and total climate collapse via the deployment of fantastical scenes of interspecial resiliency. Through layered, immersive compositions I am telling a story of a world where existential desire is louder than catastrophe and where the speculative and the sacred are irrevocably enmeshed.”

Melissa Stiefel has spent years capturing still-images of people, and landscapes from around the world with a unique and distinctive style. She might be an introvert, but her camera has given her a voice and the courage to push herself outside of comfort and into new opportunities to include teaching photography in India for 5 months and now attending Burren College of Art. She also holds an MFA in Photography and Sculpture from University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Melissa draws much of her inspiration from cinematography and mythology to create art that draws the viewer into dialogue with natural cycles.

“At Burren College of Art, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with the terrain around me in the Burren and bring my artistic vision to stage the connection all humans have with the wildness around them. My intent has been to pay respect to the passing of time and bring to light the impression that nature makes on me as well as the impact I make on it. My images use dramatic skies, dark textural tones, motion and transformation to communicate mystery and impermanence.”