Sycamore Land Trust Annual Appeal. 2024.

Creative Projects

I am a mixed media visual artist whose work often emerges from the intersections of my ecology- and climate-based research, my experience in applied conservation work, and rendering the ideas within these disciplines accessible to the public. I primarily create within traditional and digital illustration, but more recently have found myself expanding my long-held love of knitting into the fiber arts, as well as giant puppets!

I believe that the creation and communication of art is fundamentally based in our communities. Cultivating engagement with the public has been foregrounded in my creative endeavors, particularly within my careers in scientific research and land conservation.

Southeast Savanna Fire Ecology. Pencil and digital illustration. 2023.

Science & Conservation Communication

As a scientist involved in issues of climate change, land conservation, and environmental protection, I believe engaging others with our work through accessible and creative means is crucial for fostering lasting change.

Shaping an Ecosystem. Pencil and digital illustration. 2022.

This piece was initially featured in the environmental nonprofit Sycamore Land Trust's Winter/Spring 2022: The Wildlife Issue" of The Twig newsletter. During my time as a land steward for the organization, I witnessed beavers move into a bottomland field preserve that we had been preparing for wetland restoration. The beavers beat us to it, drastically changing the hydrology, landscape, and more-than-human community of the preserve. This comic was the culmination of my desire to share this beautiful story of ecological dynamics and restoration while foregrounding the accessibility and impact visually rendering this story could create with the public.

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Arts-Based Research / / Research-Based Art

Situated in the sciences while holding my artistic background close, I have found my research and creative practices continuously feed into and inform one another, allowing new ideas and insights to flourish.

A [Trans]calar Triptych

Ellen Bergan and Nick Koenig. [Trans]scalar Triptych. Multimedia yarn, photograph, and print, 2023. © Ellen Bergan and Nick Koenig.

Over the course of my research conducting qualitative microanatomical analyses on tree samples collected from an underwater Pleistocene-aged forest, I have worked to further our understanding of ancient coastal ecosystems and their response to climate change. This project's ancient wood microanatomy inspired my to begin incorporating my artistic background towards informing and re-imagining my research within paleoclimatology. Working within the knitting and textile crafts, I render tree-ring and climate science visual through fiber art to evoke tangible manifestations of changing climates, ecologies, and temporalities.

In [Trans]scalar Triptych, my creative partner Nick Koenig and I work alongside a wood sample from the Pleistocene-aged underwater forest and [re]present it through three different media and methodological approaches to arts-based research: photography, lace-knitting, and printmaking. Pairing these microanatomical visualizations with theories in queer trans ecologies and entangled fields of inquiry, we explore the renderings of a body across scales of time, space, and atmospheres. With this project, we probe at the parallel, precarious existences of the submerged Pleistocene wood-bodies and our queer & trans human-bodies, enmeshed and collaborating together in our scientific and artistic practice during an age where increasingly unpredictable climate futures saturate our shared lives and ecologies.

To read more on this piece and its arts-based research weavings of paleoclimate, ancient trees, and queer trans ecologies, check out:

Bergan & Koenig, 2023. "Pleistocene to Anthropocene: A Queer, Underwater Wood-Based Triptych." NiCHE: Arts-based Research in the Anthropocene Series (Editor's Choice: July 2023).

Bergan & Koenig, 2024. "[Trans]calar Triptych: Queering Pleistocene Wood." Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture; Queering Nature Issue.

Leek Field Morning Rituals (The Queers are Feeding You!) Pencil. 2023.

Trans Field Notes

How can foregrounding queer trans affects and modes of relation change the methodologies of scientific research? In Trans Field Notes, myself and a cohort of queer trans scholars, artists, and activists practice observational drawing reminiscent of field notes characterizing “research” in field-based sciences. Simultaneously holding in tension dominant science's ideals of 'the field' as a separated, othered space, we bring queer trans modes of relationality to our surroundings to envision entangled connections saturated in our everyday landscapes and question 'field notes' solely as a technical method.

More on this creative research practice and queer trans methods in reserach coming soon!

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