regenerative actions exhibition

Submergence Collective exhibited four components of The Piñon Project as part of a group exhibition titled Regenerative Actions, curated and hosted at the Roswell Art Museum, NM in 2024. The exhibition was a collaboration between the Roswell Museum and the Santa Fe Art Institute(SFAI) to celebrate artistic projects seeking to provide models for a better future amid climate change.

“A regenerative action is a gesture, movement, or effort to achieve a reversal of human-led environmental destruction through adaptive strategies of regrowth and revival engendering a renewed existence of all species on this planet” (Regenerative Actions exhibition catalog, 2024).

In October 2024, the Roswell Museum was deeply impacted by a 500-year flood event, which caused extensive damage to the space and artworks, including the works in Regenerative Actions. Read more about this climate change fueled disaster and the Roswell, NM art community’s efforts to rebuild here.

Works exhibited

We bear; we are born

A multimedia collage exploring engagements with and surrounding piñon. The layered assemblage of works on paper and textiles includes reflections on personal relationships with piñon, observations of piñon habitat species entanglements, documentation on Pinus edulis propagation, histories of piñon crop harvests, and digital scans of piñon pitch, bark, roots, and seeds. 

Materials: Risograph prints, inkjet prints, naturally dyed fabric, embroidery, painting, phototransfers, beeswax

To deep-love throughout time

A piñon root gently dug from a dead piñon tree near Santa Fe, NM, painted with unfired micaceous clay and draped in cotton rope, is a ghostly contemplation on the mycelial underworld’s experience of loss, grief, mourning, and memorialization for/of their symbiotic partner, Pinus edulis. Visit To deep-love throughout time to read more about this project.

Materials: Carefully dug piñon root, unfired micaceous clay, cotton rope, organic olive oil infused with piñon pitch

Bearing Withness 

An experimental sound artwork that is both a performance and conversation with an elder piñon pine, connected to a biodata synthesizer. Visitors were invited to sit and immerse themselves in the sound experience through headphones while taking in the aroma of piñon pitch. Visit Bearing Withness to read more about this project.

Materials: Headphones, audio interview with piñon-biodata sonification, piñon pitch

Piñon Project Greenhouse

Photographic documentation of an event where Submergence Collective invited our community to coalesce around a mobile greenhouse that we built to create a physical space to witness the piñon seedlings in their growth journey and share stories with, of, and around these trees.

Materials: Inkjet prints