THE OVERTURES

Snail Trails and Constellations

An Interview with Stephanie Van Riet

by Sara Mae Henke

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Stephanie Van Riet is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of April. 

“I find despair to be quite limiting.” Stephaine says at the beginning of our interview. It’s a beautiful spring day when we talk, and I can see the afternoon sun in her eyes as she talks. “Curiosity brings all ages and different kinds of people together… Our attention can be monopolized… [there is a] meditation of slowing down and focusing on some small thing.” 

She talked about questioning different systems of knowledge, examining games and fortune tellers, before coming to snail tracks. Stephanie spent a lot of time outside as a little kid building things. Recently, Stephanie has been involved in a research study at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to supplement her current fascination: snails. Volunteering her time to work alongside the scientists, she assisted in sorting collected snail samples by species to create a baseline of what lives in the Delaware River, informing effective and responsible river management plans. She shared that her observations under the microscopic lens evoked visual parallels between river samples and outer space, furthering her interest in seemingly disparate things to show the true interconnectedness of our planet. Stephanie was also an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, where she created an 8-yard long fabric map that charts connections between snail trails and constellations. Using blue ink to print the trails and red ink to print the stars, she created a piece where under a red lens, the constellations would disappear and the trails would show through, while under a blue lens the constellations were the only information that the eye could perceive. 

“We often think we exist in the natural world, when in actuality we are of the natural world.”

Stephanie works in many mediums, sand drawings, paper-making, print-making, plaster and relief, to name a few. On our call she showed me a meandering lotus fold booklet she had made, and told me about her plans to make a longer version of it, that unfolds a bigger narrative. “I think of repetition… can make up a part of our ecosystem and lead to greater harmony… The rhythm of repeating starts to make sense and that’s how the final piece is realized. Not one piece but many parts. That’s pretty central to my process.”

When Stephanie gets stuck, she reads. In our interview, Stephanie looks up when she’s thinking, and she holds copies of On Trails by Robert Moor, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, up to the camera, mentions The Log of the Sea Cortex by John Steinbeck, and looks upward, carving out ways of talking about these books that have influenced her so much. “A lot of this work comes out of observation, but the other part of it comes out of reading.

“A lot of this work comes out of observation, but the other part of it comes out of reading.”

My notebook is sketches but also a lot of notes.” Her work is in good company. Just in the half hour we spoke, I was reminded of Lorca’s snails, the function of ferns showing us the macro impact of our micro interactions in adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, Natalie Diaz’s poetry on nature beyond metaphor, Tyehimba Jess’s sculptural poetry. Stephanie asked, how do we work with nature for nature, given that it has already been doing “research and development for 3.8 billion years.” 

During her DVAA residency, Stephanie plans to consider the tide pool as a model for universe exploration, resulting in a future installation. While we talked, she also showed a prototype of a meandering lotus fold artist book, and indicated her excitement in developing a narrative using this structure. She ends our conversation with, “We often think we exist in the natural world, when in actuality we are of the natural world.” Her work is a reminder to all who come in contact with it that to act with compassion, and remember that we are a part of something far bigger than ourselves.