The Art of Reconnection: Lee Emma Running and Daniela Naomi Molnar

In part one of “The Art of Reconnection” our series hosts, Lee Emma Running and Daniela Naomi Molnar, engage in a rich conversation about the ways their place-based practices of artmaking have transformed the quality of attention they bring to a place and their appreciation for the deep memory that is carried by the botanical, animal, and mineral elements found there.

Daniela is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes large-scale abstract paintings with pigments she creates from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Gathered from specific biomes she has visited, these paints become palettes of place with which she investigates the earth’s site-specific capacity for both memory and resilience. 

Lee creates arresting objects using cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. Her work intimately explores the impact of human-built systems on the natural world, often incorporating the bodies and bones of animals killed on roads. She invites her audiences to renew their sense of kinship with non-human beings.

Throughout their conversation, Lee and Daniela reflect on how foraging for, taking care of, and collaborating with their materials — from cabbage leaf, to deer bone, to ocher — has cultivated in them a nuanced attention to place and a profound capacity for holding seeming opposites: violence and beauty, loss and resilience, brokenness and repair. 

They discuss how the intense sensitivity of their materials makes even the most prolific sources of pigment, like queen anne’s lace, intimately site-specific; how noticing the ways materials respond to each other necessarily troubles Western notions of separateness; and how meeting grief with care and attention can reshape and heal our relationship to places of loss. 

This conversation takes place shortly after Lee and Daniela’s shared exhibition “Transformation/Reclamation” was installed at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon, in September 2024. While in Corvallis, Lee hosted a group dinner on a roadside verge, calling attention to the often forgotten border at the edge of our roads. We enter this conversation by way of the artists’ reflection on that experience.

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.