Alyssa Baguss | College of Biological Sciences

Alyssa Baguss

Alyssa Baguss’s practice explores mediated natural environments through the drawing processes and interactive creative experiences. She is a 2015, 2017 and 2019 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, the 2017/18 Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and a part of the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, and Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Alyssa's residency project, Slow Data Transmission, communicated and humanized the scientific research taking place at Cedar Creek through the creation of small drawings and paintings that visualized data, presented as a series of postcards. Postcards were mailed via snail mail to a list of residency penpals across the country, and selected art was made available on the Cedar Creek website.

Learn more about Alyssa's work at www.alyssabaguss.com and follow her journeys on Twitter.

Postcard from Cedar Creek with different kinds of ice

postcard and 3D glasses exploring the phenology of a peat bog

Greetings from Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve

Hello! How have you been?

Spring has arrived in Minnesota and life is beginning to thaw. Sensory deprivation is over! The birds are singing, water is in a liquid state, and I can smell wet dirt and hyacinth blooming. Everything is expanding and the world feels 3D again!!
One of my favorite things to do this time of year is to stroll through my neighborhood and give my full attention and adoration to any blossom I spot. I call this "flower noticing" but Kate Freund Saxhaug, coordinator of the E268 project at Cedar Creek, calls it phenology. We toured Beckman and Cedar Bog where she introduced me to all of the plants she monitors: noting when they bloom each year, then comparing it to data from the 1970s and 80s. Is the warming climate changing their bloom time?...yes. Some by almost 3 weeks.

It's easy to assume nature does the same thing every year. And when a pandemic turns the world upside down, it's comforting to have something that you can count on to be just like old times. But if you look close enough and for long enough, you'll see that things are changing. Kate has her eye on it.

There are a million things for us to pay attention to these days but I think spending some of it flower noticing is good for everyone.

Be well,

Hello friends!

My most recent travels took me to the oak savanna where Dr. Elena West and her assistant, April Strzelczyk, observe the 80+ Red-headed woodpeckers that call Cedar Creek home. In addition to monitoring their behavior, mates, nest activity and offspring, she's following their migration patterns through small tracking devices (imagine teeny-tiny backpacks!) that she's applied to the backs of 24 birds in 2020. So basically she's a professional Red-headed woodpecker whisperer! And this year, she'll attempt to catch them all and remove the tracking devices to find out where they've traveled over the past winter.

Yes, all the birds are named and highly revered. Croix has been a part of the study for six years and when we realized it was home, it felt more like a homecoming of an old friend than a member of a work cohort. Maybe as we emerge from the pandemic, you too have enjoyed reuniting with friends, family or coworkers? I hope you are able to savor these moments of joy and set a comfortable pace for re-entry into the wild.

-ab

postcard featuring a drawing of a quilt.

Dear Pen Pals,

The nights are getting longer and cooler here in Minnesota and I've been thinking a lot about quilts. Fall is upon us and I'm waking to find myself burrowed under multiple layers of blankets... I'm just not ready to turn on my heat. I still use the quilt my mom made me as a high school graduation gift, hand-stitched and packed with vibrant 1990s colors and patterns selected by yours truly. I've dabbled in quilting but concluded that drawing is a bit more my speed.

The first time I saw Big Bio at Cedar Creek, I felt like I was walking on top of a giant floral fabric quilt draped over a field and stitched together by a community of hands. Big Bio is made up of 168 9m x 9m research plots featuring different levels of plant diversity. Plots have either 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 plant species and support researcher-led experiments exploring all the ways plant diversity effects our changing world. Think of it as a giant community garden for scientists! (Planted in 1994...just around the time my mom made my graduation quilt)

-ab

postcard of plants blooming along a timeline

Hello!!
I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I am an extremely visual person. I hoke that if I can't see it, it's hard for me to know if it's real.. And is why my desk is cluttered with project information, my closet has no door, and I need to visit or experience places to help me understand them. I also rely heavily on wall clocks and seasonal changes to help me know what time of day and year it is. Having grown up in a largely farming community, the stages of the corn and soybean fields acted like a slow moving agrarian clock.

Have you ever noticed that particular months of the growing season (wherever you are) exhibit specific colors of flowers? All at once, the highway ditches are lavender, then pink, yellow, and then washed in gold. The same thing happens at Cedar Creek in Big Bio. Every month from May to September, I'd visit and record the color of the blooms I observed in plot G63. The letter G indicates that it includes 32 different species of plants and the number 63 denotes its location. Every month another flower was taking it's turn: Lupines, Butterfly Weed, Blazing Star, and others.

I hope you enjoy my G63 color timeline and perhaps consider how the colors of your own growing season could help you tell time.

-ab