Finding Art in History

Cynthia Camlin is working with the meaning of materials

Photo essay by Nicola Wasmuth

March 16, 2022

As artist Cynthia Camlin walked beside Padden Creek in Bellingham, she saw a splash of white peeking out from the silty bank. She dug out the old limestone and brushed off the dirt. The idea of turning the forgotten, crumbling white material into paint flashed in her mind.

Using homemade paints and pigments she makes from foraged materials, she illustrates the relationship between human history and the Earth.

“You learn what your work actually means from other people; you don’t control that. You have intentions and a backstory for everything…. When it goes out in the world and people look at it, it also gathers new meanings.”

As department chair of art and art history and a professor of painting and drawing at Western Washington University, Camlin has shared her skills with her students — not only by teaching, but by collaborating with them.

Aside from her responsibilities at the university, Camlin is expanding her work by using new materials from the outside world.

“I think that the labeling of materials adds another dimension to the work,” Camlin said. “Exactly how I’m using them is an ongoing exploration.”

While attending graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, she found a focus — creating commentary on the “white settler” ideas that shape our society and damage our environments.

In Texas, she studied landscape paintings of the “Wild West,” which she said were used in a way to sell the idea of pioneers “settling” Indigenous lands. “Texas Hill Country” was being marketed as beautiful and scenic, but was actually being turned into McMansions and golf courses as the expansion continued. She said the mass expansion into the hills around Austin showed her that westward expansion and white settler ideas were still intact. Camlin’s work also explores the impact of Western colonialism through the lens of climate change, creating an intersection between art and ecology, and these ideas inspired her most recent project “Swamp Garden.”

“To put the Confederate monuments in [the paintings adds] another kind of literary and psychological overlay for the swamp as a dangerous place and a place that you don’t go in because there’s alligators or snakes,” Camlin said. “That’s definitely the white settler view of the swamps.”

Despite their environmental importance, people have long pushed to “drain the swamp.” By contrasting this destructive view — represented by the Confederate monuments — with the imagery of a flourishing swamp, Camlin provides an artistic insight into the impact these ideas have on our ecosystems.

“The Indigenous attitudes towards these forested wetlands was that these were places where all the game is, where all the medicines are,” Camlin said. “[They were seen as] gardens and richness … very spiritual places.”

Her work also confronts white male ideologies with her piece, “Venus Flytrap.” These ideologies are still present today, Camlin said.

When botanists named the Venus flytrap in the late 1750s, they made crude remarks comparing the plant to a woman’s genitalia. Camlin interpreted this as botanists seeing women — and their bodies — as dangerous sexual creatures.

She pointed out that young white men are often the collectors and poachers of these plants today.

“There’s some kind of thing that they have about it, and I think that it’s really connected to this projection of sexuality, dangerous sexuality,” Camlin said. “It says something about our culture and not about the plant at all.”

While walking around a small Southern town she came across another piece of history — a crumbling building, creeping with ivy — and decided to take a peek inside. As she poked around the edges of the deteriorating school, she was fascinated and knew she needed to take a piece of its history with her, she said.

During the segregation era, it was a school for white students. When it came time to desegregate, the building was abandoned.

The history this building holds inspired her to make the crumbling wall into paint.

“To me, it matters that [the drywall] is from there,” Camlin said. “It is literally a part of that school. To me, it is a trace of segregation.”

Lately, Camlin is experimenting with new plant-based techniques to make paints. She collects materials like elderberry, rust, acorn and different rocks. She blends them together to create test patches that are pinned to the wall of her studio.

Although the process of making homemade paint and pigments is relatively new, Camlin is looking forward to using them in future projects and experiments.

Once her projects go out into the world, Camlin eagerly waits to see what meaning others will give her work.

“You learn what your work actually means from other people; you don’t control that,” Camlin said. “You have intentions and a backstory for everything…. When it goes out in the world and people look at it, it also gathers new meanings.”

Nicola Wasmuth is a visual journalism major at Western. She enjoys capturing stories in a way that is artistic and thoughtful.