By Katherine Boyce
Sarah Nassif grew up in a family of makers. The thinking was, there’s nothing you could want that you shouldn’t first try to make with your own hands. Her polymath parents imparted their skills in gardening, cooking, sewing, engineering, and building their own home, and in doing so, planted a seed of wisdom that would prove truer than Nassif knew at the time: “As long as you can work with your hands, you’ll always be fine.”
Today, Nassif is an artist and botanist with a studio practice in Casket Arts. She has been the artist-in-residence at the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization since 2021. There, she has led her socially engaged public art project Weaving Water, which invites people to participate in an indigo dyeing and weaving process. She just launched the AWE (Art + Water + Ecology) Network, a professional connection space for those passionate about that work.
Nassif didn’t always describe herself as an artist. She had received a B.S. in botany and worked in environmental education, urban forestry, and data analysis. But the practices that would become her current artform were there all along.
As an example, Nassif described taking a digital camera with her to study the local trees and plants of Minnesota. She noticed that, against the wide-open midwestern sky, the trees each made their own gorgeous silhouette. She took her digital silhouettes and screen-printed them onto textiles. The fashion world was already saturated with florals, but this was something else: this was the botanical study of the local vernacular of Minnesotan trees, expressed as art.
Artists and scientists are sometimes stereotyped as opposites, but to Nassif, the process of art and science is one and the same. “Both artists and scientists observe, record, and share.” It should come as no surprise, said Nassif, how many artists are botanists.
Through her work in urban forestry, Nassif had utilized the Public Land Survey System to map an area’s tree canopy. Years later, Nassif used the same process to create an interactive, meditative project called Leaf Trace / Land Trace to engage people in closer connection with the places they live. As one component of the experience, people were prompted to trace the outlines of the leaves they found.
In another project, Nassif engaged neighbors and community members where she lived to create a 6’x8’ wet- and needle-felted wool map of their neighborhood, featuring landmarks and backyard gardens. The communal map is an artefact of a moment in time and place.
Over time, Nassif has come to identify what she is doing as social-practice art; art that is driven less by its form and more by its function of connecting people and communities to an idea or cause. “This was where, as an artist, I get really charged up. Creating spaces for those kinds of moments to happen where other people have a chance to access their own creativity because it is hard to find opportunities if you’re not in a creative field.”
This is also where Nassif identified an even deeper element of the process, which is using our hands—both of them. There is growing neurological study of the effect of bilateral stimulation to help our brains reduce stress and anxiety. But in our smartphone-run lifestyles, “you can call your mom, cook your dinner, drive your car all by your index finger,” said Nassif. “This is not doing the same thing as…washing your dishes, folding the laundry, all of those little actions that used to fill up a lot more time.” By making our lives more efficient, we’ve cut out the health benefits of working with our hands.
Through her Weaving Water workshops, Nassif could see this effect firsthand. She wanted to engage people in discussions about water ecology—but people are cognitively resistant to devastating environmental topics. When she invited people to dip cloth into blue indigo, to sit at the loom and pass fibers back and forth, she was stunned how immediately it relaxed them. Working with their hands helped people process how cloth connects us to water, as well as to our human history of creativity. We will need this creativity to protect the environment.
Unlike art, water isn’t of negotiable value; without it, we will die. But Nassif has found that engaging someone with art turns a nonstarter topic into an open conversation. There is something maddening in how delicately we must be coaxed into saving our own lives. But perhaps tapping into our creative instincts and putting our hands to work, we’ll find our way forward.
Find Sarah Nassif at Casket Arts and at artist-in-residence events at the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization.