Streams and Mountains                                         

Anya Gleizer pursues an international art practice with an ambitious goal. Her research is led at an interface between art and science, and explores the relationship between human culture and the natural world. However her aim remains nothing less than to debunk the mindset within which these binaries persist. No human culture can thrive without the natural world; the very idea of ‘nature’ is a cultural invention. Gleizer digs deep into the soil, travelling globally to learn of different peoples’ relations to land, and what she unearths are the unsettling realities of today’s crises, but also a deeper sense of hope. “Art can do more than entertain, address a concept, or add to an existing debate. The importance of art, its power, is to fundamentally change the way we think and experience. In the case of our relationship to the environment, nothing less than an overturn of the bedrock-assumptions and rhetoric at the basis of our treatment of the outside world will suffice to achieve a sustainable future.”

Gleizer was born in Moscow, Russia and moved to New York City in 1995. She pursued her first degree in Ecology and Studio Art at Dartmouth College, in the US. After college, she moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to continue working in conservation and painting along-side ornithologists in the far arctic. Today, she works from her studio in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The wildness and wilderness of ecosystems and watersheds continue to be the driving force behind her work. Gleizer is fascinated with the natural world, its resilience and beauty. She has traveled and worked around Alaska, Canada, Ireland, Japan, Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Russia, including the shores of Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia, and remote Aypechan Island in Chukotka. Anya's work is as much based in this travel as it is in the studio. The slow, human-powered course of these adventures is a work of introspection, and plays a formative role in her installations, paintings and sculptures. Working to protect and express the beauty she discovers in the wilderness, in its animals, plants, and people, has become the challenge for Anya in both art and science. When approached from this angle, dedication to the art of nature and to the nature of art become one and the same pursuit: both tend towards beauty and its recreation and preservation as a compass needle tends towards North.