Artist Eileen Roscina holds up a pressed Queen Anne’s lace flower, seated within her Curtis Park studio.
The beauty of the natural world coupled with the mystery of creation is what moves Eileen Roscina. “My inspirations are elemental,” shares the multimedia visual artist. “The richness of soil, the quality of light, the limitless potential packed into a seed—all of the small things that tend to go unnoticed.” Her work, however, draws attention to those small things. She weaves willow into large-scale sculptures, turns pressed flowers and seeds into murals and installations, and creates works on paper including cyanotypes. Examining organic shapes, sequences and forms, her pieces explore “the tension between our connection and disconnection to nature,” Roscina explains.
Finding her own place in the world was a nonlinear journey, to say the least. From childhood, she knew that she wanted to be an artist, but her eye for the experimental took her on a path that has included film school, a stint at a sustainability education center in Costa Rica and time spent studying the healing properties of whole foods at the Nutritional Therapy Institute. When she began illustrating the recipes she was making, something clicked—then she enrolled at Denver’s School of Botanical Art & Illustration. “That was the springboard for where I am now,” she remarks.
Roscina, who is currently completing her MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder, bridges her past experiences and the media she currently works in via her expansive garden. Located in a former pie factory, her Curtis Park studio and its adjacent open lot are owned by her father, who encouraged her to fill the site with plantings. “Most of my pressed-flower works are thanks to that plot of land,” she says. Current favorite specimens sparking new ideas include Apache plume, salvia, hyssop, Jupiter’s beard, wild onion flowers and wild roses. “I never have an image in my head of what a new piece will be, I just lean into the material itself and see what develops,” the artist shares. “Much of my process is observation, like patiently waiting for the light to shift. It’s all about deep seeing.”
This December, Roscina will have shows at Walker Fine Art, where her mixed-media framed pieces will explore the theme of light and refraction, and at the University of Colorado Art Museum, which will highlight an installation and one of her films. “My hope is that my art reignites a sense of wonder with nature,” she concludes, “and that it reminds people that we all are part of it.
