Lindsay Barras

Lives and works in Austin, TX

Artist statement

In the fall of 1945, the East Prussian painter Alfred Partikel vanished while searching for wild mushrooms in the Darss forest near his home in Ahrenshoop. He was never seen again. What makes his disappearance so haunting is that Partikel had spent much of his career painting the very woodlands where he went missing - landscapes that romanticized the wilderness as a place of beauty and refuge. His story sits at the center of what my work explores: how people lose themselves in the natural world as a way of escaping daily life. In that search, we look for meaning in the symbolism we've inherited from the surrounding flora and fauna - reading nature's iconography as a way of processing memory, loss, and mortality. I'm drawn to the stories that surface in nature's isolation, and to what those narratives reveal about our need to make the natural world legible on human terms. My paintings are made with gouache on hand-dyed paper, drawing on motifs sourced from specimens and objects found in natural history museums. I juxtapose these with digital prints of photographs I've taken outdoors - pairing a historical visual language with a contemporary perspective. Though the paintings gesture toward the past, this contrast is meant to illuminate how time passes and why we search for meaning in the most remote places.

Artwork