ABOUT THE PROJECT

Interview Transcript on Isolde Finney’s

In Your Own Backyard Coloring Book on 12/7/20

​

Interview conducted and edited by Megan Orlanski

 

​

I'll be interviewing Isolde on her project for her Eco Art Studio Class. We already had a little Studio visit so I have a pretty good idea of what the project is but since then, it's come to fruition and Isolde has come out with the website for the project where you can download the digital PDF version of her coloring book.  Her project deals with grass lawns and the harm they cause to environments and ecologies. Thankfully we'll be talking to a little bit more about the project today, so I'll just get right into it. I came up with questions that I thought of as I was looking through the book, so they're sort of chronological and go with how the book is structured. So, in the introduction to your coloring books can you bring up the concept of feeling overwhelmed by climate change, are you referring specifically to the planetary scale of the issue. How does your work address scale or does it address scale at all?

 

Yes, I am referring mostly to the like planetary scale of climate change. I am studying for an Environmental Studies minor along with my BFA and so that is why a lot of my work deals with environmental issues because it's something I'm really passionate about and it's something I'm learning a lot more about in coursework. And while I'm in these courses, there are a lot of times where we're learning about something like positive feedback loop and how the ice melting reveals a darker surface which then increases temperatures even more and then melts more icecaps and stuff like that and it all just builds and compounds or just the sheer scale at which deforestation is happening and landfills are growing. All of these such huge issues that are happening on a global scale that a lot of times it feels like ‘Oh my god, how I can I as a single person do anything about this?’ but it is definitely like an overwhelming and terrifying problem that I care about, but I don't know how to do anything about it, you know? How is me recycling one can going to impact the mountains of landfills that are just growing and growing? So, that's what I was referring to when I was talking about the feeling of being overwhelmed. But then I wanted to use this project as a way to sort of reduce that scale or go from the global scale to a scale that is manageable. So, how can this project help people change little things in their day-to-day life, that if a hundred people did, would help support biodiversity in an entire state. I tried to use this global issue scale and then bring it down to a smaller in-your-own-backyard type of scale and what we can each do individually to have even just a little bit of more positive impacts.

 

I was really interested in the global vs. the individual scale that we talked about last time but was also just brought up in your project in general. I guess this begs the question, why did you choose to focus on grass lawns specifically, and why did you choose this as an entry point into individual action? The main question I'm asking is, why is this the pressing issue that you chose as the subject for your coloring book? 

 

It's sort of a little bit funny. Just because, I just really chose to talk about grass because of how much I hate grass. Like, for all of the reasons that I list in my book, I hate grass, and usually when I say that people are kind of go ‘What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense.’ I have had this conversation with a few of my friends where they're just like ‘What are you talking about?’ and then I launch into my little soapbox about all of its (grass') environmental impacts and it's so stupid and no one even realizes it and it's, oh you know, our largest irrigated crop and it does, you know, NOTHING, it's not feeding anyone, it's not supporting any native wildlife, it's not supporting barely any wildlife at all and I just kind of go off on my little rant. And I think I first found out about the environmental issues of the monoculture of grass lawns because my entry point was golf courses. So, you know, you just happen to read articles that get suggested to you and I get environmental issue articles suggested to me a fair amount, and I saw one about golf courses, this was like years ago, and I already didn't like gold because ‘Oh it's a dumb sport’ and then when I read about how much water resources and land resources golf courses use, but are also sort of a classist recreation because of the entrance fees, and you know, the cost of clubs, the cost of taking an entire day off of work to go do this hobby. It's using these using all of these communal resources of water and land but only for this select few. It's kind of the first thing that introduced me to like an environmental justice issue. After learning about gold courses, I then learned about how we all are supporting the same issues that golf courses have on our own scales in our own lawns, by fertilizing and watering and planting grass in our lawns instead of other species of ground cover that would be a lot more beneficial to the environment. 

 

That was something that I've also been thinking about since looking at your project, but grass I feel like is such a ubiquitous thing that we don't really think about its simply aesthetic purposes. So back to this idea of the individual and the universal or the global, I'm intrigued by your proposition that a smaller individual act which is coloring this coloring book, can lead to a bigger individual act, which is beautifying one's own lawn. So, do you think that narratives of sustainability can often only prescribe one scale to human action? and that's a particularly small scale. 

 

Do you mean by that we can only sort of cater to individualized action as sort of activism? Or...?

 

The question is sort of up to interpretation, but I guess what I was thinking about when I wrote this question, is that a lot of mainstream sustainability narratives are changing your consumption habits or recycling more, and I thought it was interesting how in your book you brought up sort of several levels and there's smaller and there's bigger, and I think in a way you provided a multilayered entry point for something that sometimes is only perceived as having one layer.

 

Ok, if I'm understanding your question, so, in the book I specifically chose multiple alternatives to grass lawns, there's a clover lawn, a moss lawn, a meadow and gardening and trees and shrubs, like intentional planting, and all of those options give a variety of what your yard can handle whether you have sandy soil and a shaded area or bright sun and a large, large lawn or more time on your hands, less time on your hands, you need a lawn you can run around on, or your dogs can go on, or your kids can go on, or you have a lawn that you rarely ever use, so you can use all of that space for a prairie or meadow lawn. So, I wanted to give diverse options so that someone reading this could go ‘Oh! I do have trouble growing grass in my lawn because of how shady it is, I guess I should just do moss anyways.’ or ‘Oh yeah, I do have an acre or half an acre sized lawn, and I don't do anything with the back half, and the only thing I do is mow it and that's the only time I'm ever back there, I could totally plant a prairie back there and it would be beautiful and help the environment.’ So, I wanted to provide multiple options, multiple layers of things to I guess grab more people As far as, you're talking about the layers of activism and usually environmental activist groups just say like ‘Oh, recycle more!’ or ‘Pledge to use less water this month’ and I feel like there's this interesting dichotomy in the environmental activism discussion because some people are like ‘If everyone went vegetarian and everyone recycled the world would be fixed, everyone do your own individual actions better, and the world will be better’ but then other people are like ‘Don't put all that responsibility on people because it's actually the large corporations that are the largest emitters, the largest polluters. So, why are you guilting or putting pressure on individuals to change their entire lifestyle when really, corporations should be held accountable?’ I think that going back to the mission statement of the book, that feeling of helplessness or being overwhelmed, a lot of times, the way to sort of mitigate that is to do something about it and you know, you're not the president of Walmart, you can't decide to get rid of all of the plastic bags in every single store across the country, but what you can do is something in your own home. So, it's sort of like taking control and doing something that's just even a little bit better, not only can help on a smaller scale, but it can also help your own psyche when you do care about the environment, you do care about climate change. And when you're like overwhelmed and scared by it (climate change), it just helps when you feel more in control so you can do that through individual activism, like taking shorter showers or cleaning out your recycling a little bit better so that it gets processed instead of thrown away. 

 

I am interested in these different alternatives and venues that you present in your book. I was wondering specifically when you presented these alternatives to grass lawns, why you chose to present it as a pro/con list, and what benefits do you think people can gain from that approach? 

 

I think that the pro/con structure is just a really simple way for people to know what would work and what wouldn't work in their lawn. For example, a moss lawn, if you're like ‘oh, that's really cool’ and then you do all this research about how to grow one and then it's only at the end that you realize ‘my yard is too shady’ or ‘my soil is too acidic’ or something. The pro/con list was a really simple way to say, 'Does your lawn look like this? Do this option' or 'Do you need dogs to run around in your lawn? A moss lawn probably won't work because it will get torn up' or 'Do you have parties in your backyard? Maybe don't fill it up with a bunch of tall grasses then.' I thought it was just an easy way for people to know what to research more, because if they were inspired by this book and they wanted to take on one of these alternatives, they can easily, quickly go, ‘Oh, I'm going to research clover lawns, that would work for my yard.’

 

I’m thinking about how this fits into larger narratives, I noticed you made a lot of references to DIY in your book and DIY culture. I was just wondering if you observed in the grand scheme of things, that there's a rise in DIY culture and this idea that you can do things yourself? A decline? Stagnation?

 

I included a lot of DIY stuff in the book because that's the culture I come from. I've grown up in a house that's more likely to fix something than throw it away and get a new one. We were like fixers; I don't know if that's the right word and that's the culture I've grown up in. And I definitely have a DIY culture and in my art practice it's a lot of, I'm not doing like technical, extremely detailed oil paintings, I'm taking a bunch of beer cans and hot glue and smushing them together and seeing what I can make so it's a lot more like, what I'm trying to get at is, DIY is in my book because that's the culture I come from. As far as DIY being on the rise, I think that it is? It could just be because I'm noticing it more because I'm out in the world more, like as a college student I'm meeting more people so I could just be meeting new people and exposed to it more. But there are quite a few people that I have met that are more DIY than not and I think that has to do a lot with huge social stuff like economy stuff, we are a generation that is pretty strapped for cash, so, sometimes you have to Google it and figure it out yourself instead of hiring someone or buying something new. 

 

A little bit on a different vein, but in reference to your actual art making, I was interested in your book how you didn't explicitly reference animals or these larger ecologies that you hope that people's changing of habits can produce or can assist. For example, in one page you featured animals in your drawings, on the page ‘How to Grow Clover Lawns’ where you feature rabbits and bees, but not in the text. What was the interaction you perceived between the images that frame the text and the text itself and what were you trying to convey with that? 

 

I had a lot more research than I included in the book and that was because I was trying to find a balance between this chunk of text that would include all of the information you needed to know and the images people wanted to color because I am sort of marketing this as an educational coloring book, so obviously there needs to be images for people to color, but it's also educational so I had to put the text in there somewhere. So, in the entire book I was trying to figure out ways to balance text and image for it to be educational, but also interactive. So specifically, on the Clover Lawn page with the bunnies and the bees it was partly an aesthetic choice because I was drawing a clover lawn and clover's not the most interesting thing to color, it's small green plants, so I knew that I needed to include something more engaging on the page, and I thought of animals. Initially, that was because I was learning that clover is really easy to grow with grass, but it actually provides a lot of support for pollinators, like bees, so that's why the bees are included because clover supports them, it provides the nutrients they need to stay alive and stay pollinating. The rabbits I included because they're kind of one of those animals you see all of the time but they're more charismatic than a squirrel or a bird oftentimes. People see rabbits and they go ‘Oh, that's really cute’ and so it was my first thought of when I was like 'what else can I include in this yard?' ‘I just thought about the rabbits that I see hopping around and how cute they are and how I see one and I'm like ‘Aw, adorable!’ So, it just seemed like the easy thing to include for people to think ‘Cute! I want to color a rabbit! Look, it's a mama and a baby rabbit, adorable!’ So, that was mostly an aesthetic choice, but it was based on the research I found about clovers supporting pollinators. 

 

It was interesting to hear about your thought process behind creating these coloring book pages which we often to hear from people who create coloring books, I think sometimes it's just so consumable that sometimes the attention is not even there. I have a bunch of coloring books, but I could not name the author of a single one, which is also a reflection on me, but now I'm going to go look. We sort of talked about this genre of coloring books and you said that you had marketed it specifically towards adults and we were talking in your studio visit about coloring book specifically for adults, but we also acknowledged that coloring books as a genre are typically marketed towards children and even in the adult versions of the books there's this childlike nature that's associated with them. What do you hope to gain by using this genre to communicate these messages about grass lawns and their alternatives? What do you think of their associations? 

 

I initially chose to do this type of project because the assignment that we had in our Eco Studio class was about community engagement and I definitely wanted to do something about ecology, just because that's where a lot of my interests lie in the environmental studies spectrum. I'm really interested in ecologies and how different environments impact species and how different species relate to one another. Then, I of course, thought of my own hatred for grass and thought, ‘Yeah! That's what I'm going to talk about!’ I chose the format of a coloring book because it was more accessible in our time of social distancing and Covid-ness, having a coloring book that people can download themselves, access online, people are always online now, and it's a really easy way to disseminate a project, and then they can download it in their own homes and print it off and there doesn't have to be me getting tested for Covid and then packaging up all of these coloring books in a safe manner that's sterile and then shipping and then going through the mail and being touched by a bunch of people and then arriving at someone's house and it's just a little bit more contained, it's a safer way to disseminate this project rather than printing them off and shipping them. I chose the coloring book for safety, but also because I knew that there was going to be a lot of research and a lot information and text, and I wanted a way to present all of this information but in a way that made people want to read or want to interact with it. So, I thought, I could do an art book and just have pretty pictures around this information, but that's not how I wanted it, I wanted it to be more interactive. Having a coloring book would mean people would have fun coloring it and create this project themselves and it would be really nice, and I love this idea of having people add on to the artwork that I've already made and the idea of my time and effort and work on this project bringing someone joy or bringing someone peace. I know a lot of people who do coloring books as a way to wind down or clear their minds so I loved the idea that my work could provide an emotional support or benefit to someone while also getting them to interact with the project that has this information, I'm really passionate about. I figure if someone is sitting there for an hour coloring this page, at some point they're staring at it long enough, they're going to read the text on it, and they might read it multiple times because they're spending an hour on it, so it was one of those ways to get people to look at information and spend time with it and absorb it more than just having something on a poster that someone might just walk past without a second glance. 

 

I hope that people do really interact and engage with this work, and on that, my final question(s): What do you hope comes from the release of your book? Or do you see a future of creating other books like this about other ecological issues, or the same one? Do you think that you would be the only person creating them or would you want other people to join in the effort?

 

I'm really glad that you asked this question because I am planning on doing a more coloring books and I'm really excited about it so I'm glad that you asked that so I can talk about it. I released it and I just posted it on social media, and I got a few immediate responses from friends like ‘This is really cool’ or ‘that looks great’ or ‘nice’ And then my I shared it to Facebook group for my Church which is a Pagan Church, so you know, a coloring book with pretty plants about taking care of the planet in a Facebook group with a bunch of people who worship nature as a religion, great marriage there. I got a lot of positive feedback from there with people being like ‘Thank you, this is beautiful, what a great resource’ and it was really, really heartwarming. Then, my mom shared it as well and this is kind of what I was talking about, the dissemination of the project and having it be a link online that people can share it and it can just spread further, so my mom shared it and then on her page one her friends is a teacher, and she wrote ‘This is really cool, can I have your permission to use it in my classroom? And, when we are getting back to work would you want to do a presentation about it?’ I was not expecting that at all, I was not expecting a teacher to go ‘This is really cool, do you want to talk to my students about it?’  That was really surprising, and in a way, elevated my goal with this, I think initially I was just like some of my friends are going to color this and hopefully share it around, maybe a few new people will see it go ‘I didn't know that’, but now I'm realizing that this might be the start of something bigger and this project can may be taken into classrooms or published in like an official conservation magazine, I don't know, but it did give me this spark of ‘Oh, where can this go?’. For the second part of your question, yes, I am planning on continuing this project and I'm going to keep my website but I'm going to add additional pages to it so that you can navigate between the alternatives to lawns project with all of the research included and then also go to a second coloring book and all the research and that will be about composting. And then I may continue doing these and go in to, I don't know, recycling or water conservation to random household hacks to reduce the amount of energy you use I'm not sure yet, all I know is that the next project is to be composting because you know there's a whole other project I could rant about, but it related to the lawn care idea, so it will expand there. That thought (about collaborators) had not crossed my mind, partly because it's finals time in school, so I'm pretty singularly and goal-focused right now with just getting the rest of my projects done, but I'm glad that you said that because that's something I hadn't considered before and that could be really, really cool. In my Eco Art Studio class, during the presentation of the projects there was a lot of excitement from everyone and we set up like a Google Spreadsheet where people could post images, links, or Instagram accounts, whatever their whatever format of project was in, people shared all of the links so that the other peers in the class could help that project by giving the Instagram page about littering a shout out or share a video that someone did like on the internet, so just spread it around. So, I had already decided that on the website there will be a page for ‘Check out these other Eco Art Projects’ where it links to my classmates or even other artists in the sphere of Eco Art. But I had not thought about expanding this project to have other artists collaborate and make coloring books of their own, but I like that idea, and maybe we could create a small, little Eco Art educational coloring book empire, that's pretty cool.  

 

I'm glad that that was like a productive idea for you. I'm excited to see the future of this project unfold and will definitely be working on my coloring over Winter Break.