A few years ago, Michelle Robinson was invited to participate in an exhibition about the L.A. River. “From the beginning of colonial settlement, the river has been a battleground between the needs of industry and the unpredictability of nature,” she says. “I wanted to make those impacts visible to the public via a series of portraits of the lost animals.”
Her series, “A Field Guide to Lost Creatures of the L.A. River,” depicts wildlife no longer found in the river, such as the Southern California Steelhead. “With an estimated 400 alive in the wild, there is some urgency if they are to be saved,” says Robinson.
To create her “Field Guide,” which she calls a form of “activist melancholia,” she started with research and found herself inspired by old botanical illustrations. For Southern California Steelhead (Endangered), as with each piece in the series, she used reference materials and Photoshop to design the image before sketching it on muslin, explaining that once she begins to actually embroider—in this case using colored cotton with satin accents—the process becomes intuitive.
Black thread was then stitched on a separate piece of water-soluble material that was tacked to the muslin. Once the whole piece was complete, Robinson washed it in water, and the material holding the black embroidery dissolved, leaving a tangled mass. The percentage of each of the series’ creatures that is rendered in black directly correlates to its status as vulnerable, threatened, or endangered in California.
Currently serving as Head of Characters at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where she has worked for more than 30 years, Robinson says that she is drawn to meditative creative practices, and her personal art allows her to pose questions and process topics that weigh heavily on her. She hopes her series will inspire viewers to help efforts to revitalize and restore the L.A. River.
See more of Robinson’s art at www.michellerobinsonstudio.com.
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