Featured Interview: The Injured Birds in Aram’s Soul and Magical Things

Watch this recording of a conversation between EDC featured artists Aram Polster and Jana Kopelent-Rehak, hosted by Kristine Roome.

Featured Interview: Aram Polster and Jana Kopelent-Rehak on April 24th, 2026.

Moderator: Kristine Roome

Biographies

Dr. Jana Kopelent-Rehak, cultural anthropologist, artist, and filmmaker, is currently a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University in the Earth and Planetary Science Department and at the University of Maryland in the Anthropology Department. Her research embraces a range of issues, including social ecology and climate, sustainability, environmental health, urban inequality, political processes, and social suffering. Her most recent work on sustainability resulted in the upcoming co-edited textbook, Sustainability: Transdisciplinary Case Studies. Her work on Smith Island resulted in the book We Live in the Water (2023), which examines the changing socioecology on Smith Island in Maryland, with a focus on climate, heritage, and aging. As she continues her writing based on Smith Island research, she is also engaging in urban anthropology in Baltimore, addressing the urban environment, public art, housing, and health. In the Czech Republic, she worked with ecological refugees from Chernobyl, and her work was published in Amnesty International in Norway. By publishing about the sustainability of the Otava River in the Czech Republic, she continues her work on environmental health. She published a book, Recovering Face (Rehak 2012), about Czech political prisoners, addressing social processes in post-socialist Central Eastern Europe, followed by the collaborative publication The Politics of Joking (Kopelent-Rehak, Trnka 2019), an original contribution to the anthropological study of humor in political life. 

Aram Polster, identifies as a transgender artist. They were raised in NYC, but spent many years working outdoors with horses and other animals, eventually finding a love of birds after working many years at a chicken sanctuary. Coming from a family of collectors, creativity was encouraged and supported. Aram began assembling and creating sculptures from found and discarded objects, and would collect many items most people would consider trash. Influenced by a variety of religious teachings, and the artists who express the sacredness found in nature, Aram’s art strives to reflect the mystical and esoteric belief systems that exist outside the mainstream. After relocating to Smith Island, Aram was able to collect many items from the dump and incorporate them into sculpture and mixed media art in an attempt to encourage individuals to see the beauty in ordinary and broken things. Many of his pieces reflect the bird life found on Smith Island, with later work expressing his love of horses. All proceeds from the sale of his art go to support the work of his bird sanctuary on Smith Island.

Aram can be reached at Smith Island Beans Coffee Roastery 802 952 8702 or smithislandroaster@gmail.com

Dr. Kristine Roome is the curator and host of the EcoArts forum on the EDC. She has a PhD in applied anthropology from Columbia University. She works at the Smithsonian Institution and teaches at Johns Hopkins University in the Museum and Society Program and in Georgetown University’s Prison Justice Initiative.

Transcript of Interview

KR: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Ecological Design Collective. I’m Kristine Roome, curator and host of the EcoArts Forum. Today is Friday, April 24th, 2026. This is the first of what we hope will be an ongoing featured artist conversation series.

We host four artists per year on the EDC platform, where viewers can read the artists’ bios and enjoy looking at their work. We thought we would take it a step further and actually talk with the artists to get a more in-depth view.

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Jana Kopelent-Rehak, who was our first featured artist, and she’ll be in conversation with Aram Polster, who was the featured artist on our platform this year from January through March.

Dr. Jana Kopelent-Rehak is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and filmmaker. She is currently a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University in the Earth and Planetary Science Department, and at the University of Maryland in the Anthropology Department. Her research embraces a range of issues, including social ecology and climate, sustainability, environmental health, urban inequality, political processes, and social suffering. Her most recent work on sustainability resulted in an upcoming co-edited volume called Sustainability: Transdisciplinary Case Studies. And her work on Smith Island resulted in the book We Live in the Water, which examines the changing social ecology of Smith Island in Maryland, with a focus on climate, heritage, and aging.

Aram Polster is an artist based on Smith Island. He was raised in New York City, but spent many years working outdoors with horses and other animals, eventually finding a love of birds after working many years at a chicken sanctuary. Coming from a family of collectors, creativity was encouraged and supported. Influenced by a variety of religious teachings, as well as the sacredness found in nature, Aram’s art strives to reflect the mystical and esoteric belief systems that exist outside the mainstream. After relocating to Smith Island, Aram continues to collect many items from the dump and incorporate them into sculpture and mixed media art in an attempt to encourage individuals to see the beauty in ordinary and broken things. Many of his pieces reflect the bird life found on Smith Island, and later work expresses his love of horses.

I’d like to welcome you both. I realize that even though some of your work may be new to viewers watching this now, the two of you have actually been in conversation for several years. For the most part, I would like to turn it over to the two of you. But I’d like to start by asking how you came to know one another, and in particular, Jana, what appealed to you about Aram’s work?

JR: Thank you, Kristine, for hosting us. It’s good to be here. I came to the island in 2013, and very shortly after that I started coming regularly throughout the year, monthly, mainly with the goal to just see what it’s like to live on the island. But as an artist and photographer, I started photographing right away, even before I met people and got to know them.

I forgot whether I first met Aram or I stumbled upon his magical garden. But it was the garden first, I guess. For me, it was like coming home.

Before I continue about his garden, I just want to say I’m from the Czech Republic. I was growing up in Prague, and during my time in Prague I got to know a lot of artists—a lot of artists of an older generation who remembered or were part of avant-garde art in the Czech tradition: surrealism, impressionism, a return to magic realism. When I found Aram’s garden, I realized it was so familiar to me. It just felt like home.

Then I was invited later to his home inside, and that became even more profound for me. That was very much in the beginning. I thought maybe it would be appropriate to give an impression of Aram’s garden first, and some of the art that I got to see before I even knew the meaning, or knew Aram, or got to know him as a creative person.

I’m playing a sound recording from a chime deck he created. He’s got two that I know of. Very often when you come to this garden, even when he’s not there, the sound you hear is wind and birds. Even when he’s not there. Very often I would go during the morning, because it’s situated toward the east, so the light is really beautiful in the morning.

One of the things that happens in his garden that is incredible in terms of light is the glass in combination with the wood and metal. Because of the morning sun, the glass is usually shining, and you can see through—it’s magical. But it’s always in relation to either wood, as you could see, this ghost tree, or the metal parts. This is an overall picture that shows you the front yard.

What is special also—photographing and coming over the years, since really 2015 up to today—I realized, looking at images over these years, that his displays are always changing. I don’t know whether it’s intentional; we never talked about that. But I realized that I have a collection of photographs from the garden, from different seasons, different time periods, and somehow there seem to be new pieces, and sometimes they disappear, and a different piece appears after a while with the new season.

AP: Yeah, the yard looks a little bit different now. That’s a really early photo you got there.

JR: There are a couple of pieces that are consistent, and this one, to me, is one of them. One theme that runs through the garden often is a circle. A circle within a circle within a circle—these layers of circles.

Over the years, I have been taking notes. This is a poem that I wrote for my book:

Empty blue glass bottles on the branches of a small ghost tree. Old rusty engine given a bird’s soul. A metallic circle with a blue glass eye at its center. A propane torch transformed into plague doctors. A decoy duck gathering in the wooden workbook across squishy grass. Pink plastic flamingo on the edge of marshland. Remains of broken plates glued into the top of the ghost tree trunk. A metallic duck torch floating in the air, broken wine glasses. Crying seagulls, the soul of lost metallic objects in the light of poetic magic found. In the meta-reality: the imaginative and the personification of material objects— Aram’s culture garden on Smith Island.

This is, in a nutshell, some of the pieces I comment on. These are plague doctors. Here is the plates on the ghost tree, and here is a little floating bird. These are some of the examples, but of course there are many more.

KR: Yana, can I ask? The poem is absolutely beautiful and inspiring. You did say something that caught my attention. I hope you don’t mind if I ask a question. You’ve been observing Aram’s work for a long time, and I’m wondering how purposeful it is that he is changing up the garden, and what that process might be. Is the garden itself also part of the artwork? I think this is a question for Aram.

Aram, can you answer that? When Jana was talking about your garden, that it’s ever-changing—can you tell us about that?

AP: Well, here’s the thing. I am constantly finding things that have been abandoned or discarded around here, and now I’ve become a refuge for people to just drop off things at my house. Sometimes I’ll come home and I’ll find some sort of piece of who knows what—metal, wood. They see something and they’re starting to understand what it is I’m doing. They see something and they look at it differently than a piece of rust on the ground. They’ll pick it up and leave it for me. It’s almost like crow crumbs being left for me, because they’re getting it.

In terms of changing up things—right now, I’m being inspired to do a whole jellyfish assemblage with a bunch of different metal materials. That’s going to take up a large part of the yard. I’m looking out there now. But some things just stay there, because that’s where they’re meant to be, and other things have to find a new home.

I just recently moved sort of an alligator sculpture to another part of the yard. In different seasons, you’re going to get a different feeling for where something should be. Right now it’s spring, so this alligator may look better brooding underneath a tree that’s just coming into bloom, as opposed to wintertime. He may be in a cave, in another area that doesn’t have so much dramatic effect.

I just moved another work I’m working on. It’s a heron. Jana, I don’t know if you have any pictures of that one, because the wind had taken it and destroyed part of it, so I had to redo it. It’s a heron made with old CDs and metal conduit that you run wire through.

JR: I have that image here.

AP: Sorry about that, guys. Can’t help the seagulls. So yeah, I think it’s more of a seasonal approach to what’s going to work at a different time of the year. Does that answer the question?

KR: Yes, it does. Thank you. Jana, do you want to show some more images or talk through a little bit more?

JR: Sure. I just want to say that in the garden there’s a topic that is recurring, which is the circle, and the circle is spiritual, and it can be so many different things—seasonal. But then the second, and I would say maybe first, topic that runs through all of Aram’s early work is birds. You see how, if I’m correct, in the middle—

AP: Let me interrupt you for a minute there, Jana. That one in the middle, it’s called Game Bird. If you focus in on the Scrabble piece towards the bottom of the bird itself, it says—try to remember what I did there—I wrote Rara Avis or something. Game bird. Rare bird. I did that in Scrabble letters. Then I incorporated all different game pieces to create that. You’ll see the pool ball eyes and the cards and chess pieces, dominoes. So that’s not an owl, that’s a game bird. It’s sort of humorous. And it lights up.

JR: There are glass pieces too that you can’t really see in that photograph.

Then there’s a group of birds by the window, and this bird I’ve selected because, again, it’s a bird that has been there for a long time in the same place. I realized a lot of other sculptures are coming and going and moving somehow in the house.

When I walked in, just like in the garden, there was something about the house that reminded me strongly of houses and homes of my friends in Prague—artists literally living in your own creative space, and everything around is creative, and everything is kind of like a gallery integrated into everyday life. That’s what made me want to connect and know more.

There are these birds that are floating and standing, and some of them are coming and going. Now new sea animals are coming in. We have a fish that I didn’t have a chance to include here, and there’s an octopus.

And then, of course, books. There’s an art, and the birds, and the light fixtures, and books. I know books are very important for Aram, and it’s a really fascinating collection of so many different genres and topics. For Aram, books are a great inspiration and important part of his home, just like music, which always is part of his house when I walk in.

So there’s the symbiosis of soundscape—of the birds and the music, and the birds, and the books, and the light. There’s a fire, and the cats. Aram’s universe, this sort of home space, is very interconnected. It’s not compartmentalized, it’s not divided. There’s a sense of connectivity between making his lunch, dinner, being around the birds, feeding the birds, and making the art. It seems like all one, and I can really connect to that well.

AP: Yeah, there is a continuity all there, for sure.

KR: Aram, can you speak to someone who is new to your work? All the items that you’re collecting—are they all from Smith Island?

AP: This island has been very inspiring for me for many years. I lived in Vermont for seven years, and it was incredibly difficult to create there just because I wasn’t connecting in the same way. I mean, it’s beautiful there. I love it. But my creativity was sort of—oh, shoot, my battery is dying. I’m sorry, I hate to plug this in. Something about being here on the island and being near the water and feeling that energy is very inspiring.

I forgot what the question was.

KR: Jana has been talking about some of the things that you’ve collected and how it’s all integrated—whether it’s books and sound, and images. I was just asking a little bit more about the items that you collect.

AP: Right. When I ride my bike out on the road, there are all sorts of pieces of metal that I find. Some of it I’m just not inspired by. It does nothing for me. I’ll see it, and blah blah blah, or someone will say, “Hey, do you like this?” And I’ll look at it, and unless there’s some sort of immediate connection with it, I have to reject it. I don’t see what it’s going to be, but I see it’s going to be something.

Someone gave me a broken red tape measure with a little bit of tape sticking out. I immediately saw that that was going to be a chameleon’s head, and I rushed home and started putting together this chameleon. There’s a sense of immediacy about things that I find. But then I have piles of potential all around, and I never know which direction I’m going in at a particular time.

It’s almost like why I have so many books—I never know what kind of friend I want to be hanging out with on a particular day. So it’s nice to have a whole bunch of them, just in case. Same with the stuff I pick up. It’s very rare for me to say, “Damn, I should have picked that piece of metal up.” It’s such an immediate thing when I see something that—even though I don’t know what it’s going to become right at that moment—it will become something sometime. So I’ve never really regretted passing up things. Or else my yard would probably look even more chaotic than it already does.

KR: Can I ask you both a question? Jana, you wrote a really important book that came out about a year or so ago called We Live in the Water. You talk about the conditions on Smith Island, and I’m thinking about that book in relation to this. I find your sculptures, Aram, just whimsical and fun. There’s a lot of joy there.

I don’t know whether to direct this to you or to both of you. Jana, you’ve done your field work there for a decade or so—correct me if I’m wrong—and Aram, you’ve been there as well. Can you both speak to the context of the conditions on Smith Island? We are an ecological design collective. We talk about environmental sustainability. So I would love if you both could speak to that a little bit.

AP: Go ahead, Jana, you first.

JR: For me—yes, of course, I see the playfulness in Aram’s world overall. But I also have to say that my experience as an anthropologist on the island: I see islanders in this habitat working very hard to just make it, but then making time and space for play, for socializing, for community. It’s never just hardcore struggle. Even watermen—some of them paint, some of them do sculpture. There’s a sense of creativity that is there. In some ways, it’s something about the habitat, that space where you have water coming, you have wind, it’s very much on the edge. Your day is dictated and a little out of control, because the weather is in control. Weather is in charge of what your day is going to be like.

That is serious business, and you’re constantly at the mercy of weather and ecology and environment. And yet at the same time, Smith Islanders—and this is how Aram is part of the island community—there is always space to take that extra time and do something creative, inventive, playful, that comes from very little. We don’t need too much to connect to creativity, imagination.

Imagination is, for me, now, in retrospect, as I’m looking at Aram’s work—his imagination is just what he described: seeing something ordinary, banal, mundane, and seeing right away. That, to me, is imagination. It’s a training in imagination that can be contagious.

I have to say, now I do also see things thanks to Aram, and I’m also one of these people pushing things on him. I started young doing art, and then I stopped, and I went to anthropology. It was coming to the island that I started doing art again. I don’t have internet when I’m there. I don’t have TV. You have time, because you don’t go shopping. You don’t waste your time on things that just are not available there. I don’t know if that makes sense.

AP: Kristine, I took your question in a different way than Jana did. I am definitely aware of the lifespan of this island, and how we’re all really living on the edge of—without being too dramatic—breakdown, disaster of the environment. And feeling it here.

I bought my house in 2004. I moved here and moved away so often. Right now, I’ve been back from Vermont for about eight, ten years now, almost ten years. When I first moved here ten years ago and I look at it now, it’s like night and day. The tide, the climate change, has really affected how my environment has changed over the ten years I’ve been observing it.

My experience with that is very rooted in the finiteness, the fragileness of my home. I don’t want to think about it, but I’m going to have to think about it at some point. We’re losing a lot of ground very quickly here, and people here don’t really think about it that way. I’m not going to get into the politics of this place, but many of them don’t believe in climate change. Even though they work on the water and they see all this, they think nothing is happening here.

The amount of waste that goes on here on this island is unbelievable, and how little concern there is for a biomass. We have an incinerator that burns up trash. We have dumpsters that take away everything else, and God knows where they end up.

In terms of how I see this place, it’s beautiful, but the other side of that is there’s this doomsday feeling as well. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s a little scary at times the way we’re going here. Meanwhile, I have to appreciate the life that is around me, and that’s what I try to find joy in by creating these sculptures from things that are being thrown out. That’s just what it is. I can’t collect it all, but it’s rare that I have to go and buy something to create. It’s rare that I have to do that. I have to buy marbles, maybe, or something.

I don’t know if that even addressed your question. I kind of cut off. I got off on a roll there about the environment.

KR: No, it does. Jana, do you want to respond to that?

JR: If I may jump in—it makes me think about what you said about islands and island-ness. Very often when we think about an island as an environmental genre, or place, or space, or habitat, I think we have two views.

On the one hand, any island in the global scene has always been connected to mainland—whether colonial or governmental or on any level. There is a connectivity, exchange with the mainland that plays a role. In some ways, any island is always a miniature biohabitat of what’s happening out there in the world.

On the other hand, we have this romantic vision, or search for a better place in literature, film, often reflected when there is a need for change in society. People tend to want to go to the island to start over again. Generally we have these notions of islands being a new possibility for social relations, for environment, for art, for anything really. That has been in the philosophical history of ideas for a while now.

But we also have studies that show there is a fluidity—there have always been this fluid exchange where islands are affected by global economy, by global environmental health. The classic is when you think about COVID. Suppose we think about this island as a miniature version of the United States. In some ways there is a certain composition; it’s just more extreme in some ways. But what if it is just a micro-habitat of what is on the mainland? In social reality, over the 20th century, this island has become increasingly dependent on the mainland for its resources.

AP: Yeah, that is true.

KR: Let me ask you both, then—what do you feel is the role of art in all of this?

AP: There are many people here who express themselves creatively—not all islanders. What Jana was saying: people come here with a certain romance about coming to an island and starting anew. Creative people are drawn to these isolated and remote places just so the focus can be on doing what they do and not being distracted by the outside world.

So what do we think the future of art here on Smith Island is? Is that what your question is?

KR: The question might have been a little bit broader, but you can certainly talk about it in the specifics to Smith Island. Art can bring attention to things that we don’t normally notice, and bring more attention to the environment, to climate change and so forth. It could also be a way of imagining a future, or a potential way of being, or a solution, or anywhere in between. The question was a little bit more broad. What do you feel is the role of art in this, whether it’s a microcosm on your island, or in a larger sense in environmental sustainability?

AP: Let me just finish this thought, Jana, and then I’ll hand it over to you.

What I’m doing is—I’m not going to say educational, but when people see that I am making things from things that people throw out, it makes them look at what they’re throwing out in a different way. Maybe. I can’t say for sure that that’s what’s happening. But like I said, when people come up to me and say, “Hey, I thought you might like this,” and it’s some kind of mangled who-knows-what, it means that they’re thinking about trash and garbage and stuff that gets thrown away in a different way.

As for the future of art here in relation to the environment, I don’t think I can really speak to it. All I can speak to is that I feel like I’m doing something to enlighten people that what they’re throwing out may have the potential to be something else and not go into the landfill somewhere. Art is education here, appreciation. I’m not so sure in terms of what I do. I don’t know if that’s speaking to it here. I know that I have to do it, but I don’t know how many people out there get it. What do you say, Jana?

JR: Two things come to mind. I talked about how I saw Aram’s art first, and over the years my life changed. I started to teach sustainability, climate change. Since then, I have taught a lot about sustainability, and when I started to learn more about sustainability and that way of thinking and being in the sustainability paradigm, more I realized that Aram has been doing this all along—not just reusing materials and using materials that he finds, and making something expressive that matters to him. Which I want to return to, because there are the birds, and then there is the transgender topic we wanted to talk about.

I also want to say there is great symbolism in using eroding objects on the island where land is eroding. To me, as an anthropologist, I’m linking the symbolism of eroded objects, rustic, old eroded objects—whether it’s rust or wood—and then, in contrast, glass, which is also being washed away on the shore. Showing this environmental stuff that shows up and making it into these invisible, coming-out creatures, most of which are birds.

In my book, I write quite a bit about what birds are for Aram. We talked about this over and over. I watched him interacting with his birds. They truly are his family, and he talks to them as an equal—as human beings with a soul. I have never encountered that. You see people relating to their pets, but Aram has this way of truly respecting and seeing their soul. They are soulmates. Maybe that’s the ecological connection.

But there is also the fact that many of the birds that come to him are injured, and he helps, and sees still potential. There is a sense of fragility, but also imperfection and transformation. Earlier today, Aram and I talked about how one of the things we do want to talk about is transformation—transformation that is very personal to Aram.

I wrote a little bit about it, but I think maybe it’s a good moment to bring it up now. In my book, I say that Aram came to the island as Anne, and then left and went through transgender transformation and came back as Aram. Maybe, Aram, if you want to say a few things about this, because you seem to want to express how your art making is also personally related to that transformation.

AP: I really didn’t start thinking about this until recently, in terms of the whole transformative thing. I was creating back then as well, but I think it really came into being in a bigger way after my transgender, however you want to call it, coming out.

When you look at the stuff that I do, it’s transforming something that most people would look at as being one thing—garbage, or whatever. I’m not saying that I was garbage. But then it becomes something else. And we’re not talking about cocoons and butterflies and all that, because everybody knows when you have a cocoon, a butterfly is going to come out of it. But nobody sees a piece of garbage on the floor and sees a bird happening.

In terms of what I create, it’s sort of like an extension of who I became. It’s not even who I became, it’s who I was, but wasn’t able to express the way I wanted to. There’s a correlation between those two things. I don’t know if I would do the same things if I wasn’t trans. I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. It’s an important part of my process.

Oh, I’m getting so distracted. It’s feeding time here. Everybody’s telling me what time it is. I lost my train of thought. Yeah, I think I’m done with that—the transformation thing. I said enough. I don’t know what more I can add to it. There’s a correlation between the two things, that is for sure.

JR: I just want to say I put this picture up now, which I thought would be a good ending.

AP: Oh yeah, it’s right in the background here, by the way—that same light that I made. That was a crab steamer that was thrown out. The base is the stand that the steamer goes on, and you’d put a heating element underneath it to torture the crabs until they die in it. So I transformed it into something way more beneficial than murder.

Everything there was found, except of course the marbles were not. I really love that light, and at night you got it pretty well there, Jana. The light I have right in my window upstairs is almost like a lighthouse, because the road is right there, and I’m sure you can see it from the road if you’re riding by. It’s kind of nice.

JR: What I find fascinating about this is that the light and glass gives that opportunity—it becomes like a Walter light, this sort of sense of infinity, something very positive. And it’s in contrast with this rustic piece. But together, it’s something that becomes ordinary part of your life every day. This is realism. When I say magic realism, I truly mean taking this very grounded, rustic piece of metal, and by using the glass and light, creating this sense of imaginary and very magical kind of object.

KR: It’s quite beautiful. It’s hard to take a picture of something like that, but it’s really lovely. I have to say, it’s just a lovely piece. It’s one of my favorites because of the joy I get from seeing that light in there.

JR: Kristine, back to the EcoArts collective and ecology and environment—we often forget that animals are part of it. We know plants and trees are dying on the island, and the grass and land are dying. But what I like in Aram’s work and life is the dimension of animals—that he makes space for animals in his life in a way that is very deep, and it’s reflected in his art.

Teaching sustainability classes, students—Hopkins students, even though they’re scientists, often not artists or in humanities—see the power of art to be able to communicate some of the issues that scientists have a very hard time communicating to a larger audience today. Art seems to have this potential to bridge between science and, in some ways, the larger audience—the communication about climate change, about waste, about trash, about something that is environmental-crisis driven or symbolic. To express that through arts—I see the students respond to it.

One of the things they say is that there is a space for emotions. Very often when you have a scientific paper about climate change or changing land, it’s the data and its analysis and its numbers. That is not the way the large audience is often open to listen. But when you include emotional parts, sensory parts, into the message, then there’s a chance for a larger audience to open up and hear.

AP: I think that’s very difficult to do, Jana, because most people probably don’t understand science in an emotional way. I understand science in an emotional way. When I look at a chemistry book now, it’s all art to me. It’s like an atlas of art to me. But most people looking at a chemistry book, it’s figures and calculations. I don’t know if you can make that connection of the emotion.

Wendell Berry, the poet, tried to do that. Kathleen Raine. There’s a lot of poetry that connects. Wendell Berry was a farmer, so he has a connection with the land in a way that a scientist might, but I don’t know about the emotional connection for most people with science. I don’t know if you can make that bridge. I think it’s important, I think it should happen, but I don’t know if it’s possible.

JR: What I’m noticing is students responding in a class full of 60 people who are mostly scientists going to the medical field. You show them environmental art and ask them to pick one piece and describe it, and everybody can do it—and say why, and what it is they like about it. Just like people can relate to nature, I think people can relate to art in some ways.

This idea of what’s beautiful—I think we live in a time when that’s very broad, and we know we are socialized to know that there are many ways of defining beauty, or seeing beauty in things. It’s not anymore just one, “this is the way it is.” We know there are these options, and to see beauty in this light fixture. Hearing you describing it and talking about what it means for you, there is a sense of tension between the beautiful and the painful, the suffering of the animals. That compassion for other ecological systems—we would say in ecology, but for other beings, non-human beings—compassion for non-human beings is, I think, the most important thing in our time now, when we try to be more ecologically aware and change the consciousness of how we think about our planet.

KR: We’re just coming up on the hour now, and I want to thank you both for joining me here today and sharing your insights and thoughts. And Aram, your beautiful art. We appreciate that so much. Thank you both.

JR: Thank you, Kristine. It was really wonderful to have this opportunity to talk.