An Interview with Environmental Artist Sheila Novak

First published in Unearthed

I first met Sheila in 2024 at a book club event in Ithaca—an intimate, monthly gathering focused on exploring themes of environmentalism and outdoor recreation through literature. Since then, we’ve both become regular participants, finding shared inspiration in the stories and conversations that unfold. The club has brought together individuals from a wide array of disciplines—many rooted in the sciences—all united by a shared concern for planetary health, a passion for adventure, and a deep-seated commitment to environmental and social justice.

From the outset, Sheila distinguished herself as a thoughtful and insightful voice in our discussions. With a professional background in art and an interest in environmentalism and public engagement, she consistently offered perspectives that challenged and expanded our collective understanding. Currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Creative Arts at Cornell University, Sheila’s work centers on social justice and equity, particularly as they relate to ecological realms.

Over the months of shared discussions and community events, such as food rescue meetups, I’ve come to deeply admire Sheila’s ability to evoke both beauty and critical reflection through her creative practice. Her art is not only visually compelling but also grounded in a sincere effort to elevate the voices and experiences of the communities and environments she engages with. Her commitment to inclusive storytelling and environmental advocacy continues to inspire me and enrich our community.

So, in January 2025, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sheila in her studio at Cornell to gain deeper insight into her artistic process, which has evolved meaningfully over the years to incorporate public participation. From community-based storytelling projects to co-created public installations, each of her endeavors creates space for shared discovery and mutual expression. By merging creative expression with environmental and social issues, Sheila not only raises consciousness but also fosters dialogue and empathy—tools that are crucial in addressing the complex crises of our time. Her commitment to community collaboration and spatial justice ensures that her work doesn’t just speak about people and places but speaks with them.

Learning about Sheila’s career path and artistic practice is particularly meaningful in today’s society where we face profound challenges, from climate change and environmental degradation to social inequity and collective disconnection. In a time marked by great ecological and societal loss, Sheila’s work offers a compelling response: she creates art as a form of inquiry, healing, and connection, and she invites us to reconsider how we relate to each other and to the land. More information about Sheila can be found on her website: https://sheilanovak.com/

Cheers,

Erin

Erin Hassett: How did you get involved with both environmental science and art?

Sheila Novak: It started as environmental science. When I was 18, I thought that I was going to be a scientist and do a lot of field work—the kind of scientist who made art as a passion and pastime. As I spent more time in the lab and more time in the studio during my undergraduate education, I was thinking about the lived reality of being an artist or a scientist, and I flipped my vision of how I might live my life. I decided I would be an artist who really loves science and who thinks about the natural world and is more of a citizen scientist, not practicing or researching.

I’ve always loved the natural world, and natural sciences have been really tangible for me, like a story about our world. For instance, I took some limnology classes in undergrad and thought about the way that water travels through the world. It relates to art: there’s the carving of waterways and how the water moves through the landscape and picks up sediment and deposits it in other places. It is something I can really visualize. That ability to visualize the way the world is changing or growing or transforming—the way that climate change is impacting Alpine trees or the movement of seed populations—I can imagine all those things which helps them be more real for me.

EH: Has your art had environmental themes from the beginning, and how has that changed over time?

SN: Yeah, it totally has. In high school, I was doing landscape oil paintings—portrait drawings weren’t as interesting to me. My sophomore year, I did a series of drawings based on photos I took on a backpacking trip, and my undergrad senior thesis in 2012 built on some of my environmental studies coursework. For instance, I thought about the notions of what counts as “wilderness,” what kind of nature is disregarded, or how the wilderness in our backyards is not being protected or bounded legislatively and therefore not cherished in the same way. My own personal projects were to perceive wilderness and every small piece of nature, so I was, at that time, just walking around picking up seeds, nuts, and leaves and putting them in my pockets to assemble sculptures, make molds, cast things in bronze, and then do the organic composition on top of the bronze. This was all while thinking about my own relationship to the natural world.

EH: Where did your early inspiration come from?

SN: When my mom had ovarian cancer and passed away in 2017, that coincided with a lot of movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy in the early 2010s- mid-2010s. So, this very personal thing happened simultaneously to massive social unrest. I was struggling to make my art in my early 20s while my mom was sick because I was undergoing this huge destabilizing thing and watching the world feel destabilized … It was a precious time where I was getting really formed by what I was seeing.

At the time, I was working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and their Director of Education and Curator of Public Practice, Sarah Shultz, had this project called Open Field. It was this series of socially engaged art practices that happened every summer outside on this big lawn. Artists would invite people to come interact with them in playful ways that oftentimes were questioning how we relate to each other and how we relate to the world. One series of performances called The American Lawns and Ways to Cut It by Chris Kallmyer, for example, had a bunch of push lawn mowers that were covered in bells, and he invited the public to come and push lawn mowers around the field for a day while he recorded the sounds of the bells. A different day, he had a whole herd of sheep out there munching the lawn. It just felt very playful, and it engaged people.

It felt exciting to me to have this way of relating to people and contending with the realities of the world that wasn’t orienting art practice towards creating objects of value to sit in a museum or a wealthy person’s home. It considered the audience as an actor in the that art practice or in the art making, and that was not something that I had encountered in undergrad. So, I started thinking, you know, is there ethical art making? What are the ethics of art making? What am I doing as a white woman, like enriching myself by making bronze sculptures? Is the goal to be rich, or is the goal to think about and relate to the community or relate to the world or work ethically in the landscape?

EH: How did your work become more interactive?

SN: It’s still a question that I’m contending with, and part of why I came to grad school. Initially, I was really clunky. After my mom died, it just took me a long time to really get back into the groove, but at that same time, I was managing a public art program in Boston and creating some projects too. So that’s where I really got to test the form of different sorts of engagements and just learn a lot more about the field.

The next thing I did was a public project called FLUVIAL, and it was not only my first socially engaged project, but it was my first public project and my first collaboration in 2020. It was in a rural area of Wisconsin called the Driftless region, which is an interesting geologic spot. Every other year, the Wormfarm Institute has a public art festival where they create this big loop and sprinkle public art installations along it with performances and vendors.

I collaborated with my friends, Emilie Bouvier and Crysten Nesseth, and we planned to create these massive cyanotypes to tell the story of the land and community in the driftless region. A cyanotype is a photographic process; a blueprint is a cyanotype. It was 2020, so our plan was to invite people to mail in stories. I did interviews with people, collected photographs, and researched the area to talk about the history of that landscape, colonization, and transformation of the place culturally and ecologically over time. The photographs, quotes, plant matter, and farming detritus were all imprinted into the banners through this photographic process: to make the cyanotype chemistry, we laid these materials directly on a banner prepared with the light-sensitive chemistry and exposed it to sunlight. When you rinse off the banner and fix the chemistry, anywhere that’s covered while being exposed will remain white or the color of the fabric, and anything that’s exposed will turn blue. We had almost seventy of these banners that had stories and materials on them making over a mile loop that people walked through. As visitors read one banner at a time, they’d get this snippet of a story and, maybe it wouldn’t tell them the entire thing, but in collection, it gave them this impression of this place and the many layers of meaning that this land has and the way it has transformed over time.

That project then led to other cyanotype projects. My friend, Erin Genia, and I made a series of cyanotype banners that are currently in Bloomington, MN along the Minnesota River Valley. Erin is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, and we met in Boston. I asked her to collaborate with me because of the sacred history of the Minnesota River corridor for Dakota people. Also, she’s done several projects in that area and has her own public art practice.

For the project, Kaškáŋškaŋ, we made three banners. They all prominently feature the áŋpo wičháŋȟpí́́, or morning star, symbol alongside other Dakota symbols such as a fancy shawl that Erin made and the dragonfly. We’re thinking about this landscape, healing it, and how decolonization will heal the landscape. These banners feel beautiful and something I’m really proud of. Erin and I have another collaboration coming up expanding on this in Minnesota—we’re going to be bringing in more collaborators and thinking about more of the social components and, like FLUVIAL, have people make components that then are assembled into this larger piece.

Another project, not necessarily a social practice but still public, was my community maple boil, The Storied Maple. I wore this maple tree costume, and what I really wanted to do was to create a space for people to come together and have conversations about the maple tree and how it’s a complex symbol. We could talk about climate change because it is impacting the maple sap runs, producers, and agriculture. It could be a conversation around indigeneity, indigenous practices, colonization, land rights, or a conversation around how we perceive and relate to trees. How we view them with wisdom and see them as these kinds of beings filled with lore and magic. So, I wanted to create a space where we could have that conversation while also actively making maple syrup. What ended up happening was so many people came that it couldn’t be a conversation, and it turned into something so different from what I intended that I was totally unprepared. I had wanted [a smaller] environment where we were by a fire, boiling syrup, and people were sharing stories. But 60+ people were there at a time, which I guess can also be considered one kind of success.

EH: How do you balance the artistic aesthetics with heavy themes?

SN: I feel like I’m still trying to understand that for myself. There are artists who approach their social practice work in a way where the only thing that matters is the activism, and so the aesthetics are secondary. I personally feel if you respect the subject matter and you have the skills to make it look good, why wouldn’t you? I don’t think that means you have to work with expensive materials, but you can design thoughtfully and intentionally as a way of respecting meaningful subject matter…without distracting from the thing you’re trying to advocate for.

EH: What other environmental or social justice themes come up as recurring motifs through your art?

SN: I would like to share two projects I’ve done:

One was called A Ritual for Growth, and it was a seed sprouting ritual. When I was living in Boston in 2022, I did a project that was again thinking about how we can heal the land, ourselves, and our community. Unlike the maple project, I had a limit of how many people could come, which was very successful because it allowed people to get vulnerable. Every participant received these boxes, and each one had a book guide, candles, native seeds, and pages for reflection. These kits went through this daily practice of asking a question that aligned with the status of the germination of the seed. So, for the first five to seven days, the seed is under the soil or near the surface of the soil, but it is not visibly doing anything. The whole process of getting from establishing the seed to having sprouts is about two weeks. So over those two weeks, I asked people to water their seeds every day and ask a reflective question around growth and transformation on a subject matter that was personal to them. While the seeds were going through this process of transformation, they were asking questions like is there any growth in darkness? Or, what does it take to break open? Two weeks later, we all came back together and talked about the kind of reflections people had. It was really lovely to do.

On a totally different note, I did a project last fall, called Land Medicine, with a soil scientist at Cornell, Johannes Lehmann. He thinks about nutrient reclamation and nutrient sovereignty through urine cycling, so I was thinking about what gesture I could do to evoke different possibilities. I made a cube, suspending it in gelatin, and I cast it on two different sites— an old growth forest and a Superfund site. I cast it on site, let it set, photographed it, then set the cube on copper plates in the gallery space for a week where the microbes in the soil ate it and made these massive, gross patches of goo. These two sites were placed adjacent to each other in the gallery, like human history which is equally related to both places. It’s not like old growth forests didn’t have human histories, and we have this western culture notion that the Superfund site is the site where humans lived and the old growth forest there wasn’t human history. That’s not true, and we have been in both places and have agency in the natural world. And we can be part of its healing. That was my concept and process, and it ended with the photo documentation in the landscape and the copper plates that held the marks made by the microbe-soil-urine-goo tarnishing the copper.

Urine has the exact same nutrient composition as synthetic fertilizers, just concentrated 10 times strength, so you just need to dilute it 1:10 with water to use it as a fertilizer. What happens is nutrition goes from our food into our bodies where we defecate, urinate, and then it goes straight to our waterways and into the ocean. We are extracting nutrients and flushing them and then replacing them with synthetic nutrients. So, thinking about creating more of a nutrient cycle where the nutrients stay in place and continue to feed the plants. The fact that what we produce is 100% what plants need is like a cycle of reciprocity, and that is incredibly beautiful. The piece being titled Land Medicine is the idea that what we produce is what the land needs.

EH: What has been the public response to your work?

SN: I mean this isn’t exactly surprising, but for the Land Medicine project, nowhere did it say this was made from urine except in the material list—urine was one of the last mediums listed after soil. There were people who came up, getting their faces real close to the work and really trying to figure it out. Some people would look at the media list and be so excited by it, and then other people would recoil or pull their partners away.

With FLUVIAL, we asked some of the people who shared their stories to tell us what they thought. It was a beautiful thing… how much it meant to people to have someone ask them for their story and to see their story as part of an artwork and how proud it made them feel. How viscerally they understood that their relationship to their land was important. And that did surprise me a little bit. It’s magical when the people you’re working with also care about the thing [you care about] and then feel proud or grateful. I was seeing myself in [the banners] in some ways, and they’re seeing themselves in it too. That’s really cool.

EH: Do you ever get push back or even have internal qualms about discussing indigenous matters without being indigenous?

SN: The conversations of appropriation are so complicated. To me, representation matters. It means a lot to me to be in collaboration with Erin. You can’t engage someone’s culture without being in a relationship with those people or respecting them or trying to understand the trauma of settler-colonialism, specifically with indigenous issues. I don’t think I can ever truly understand this trauma, but I have a desire to imagine a post-colonial world. I’m confused about how to move forward exactly…what de-colonization means in a logistical, practical sense. I want to think about it, want to be a part of honoring indigenous people and ensuring their survival and thriving. I feel like I’m not going to be right, but I’d rather be wrong than not try.

EH: What are your plans for the conclusion of your MFA and in the future?

SN: It’s a wildly fast terminal degree— it’s two years. You have a thesis and final exhibition of your work. I think I’m going to keep focusing on the maple theme. To me, that feels very concrete since I’ve already been dabbling in it. I can keep learning more about it this winter and develop relationships to engage with it again next year as kind of a social practice project and just approach the community engagement with a totally different methodology and see how that works.

I learned about an indigenous practice to sing to plants while growing and harvesting and thinking about songs as a way that we communicate comfort and safety to each other. My idea is to have more of a community serving project or invite people to join me in the project of collecting sap. It probably will be a pretty intensive operation to do a boil each weekend for the month of March and probably February. Having people bring in buckets of sap and teaching them how to tap their trees, asking them to provide a song that’s a song of comfort and care for them. To sing to the tree while we tap it and then have a community sing-along while we boil the sap. I don’t go to church now, but it’s like a way of being in community together—everyone knows what to do, and everyone can participate to the degree they’re comfortable. There’s something that’s connecting without the vulnerability of speaking up in front of a group of people, so that’s kind of the experiment I want to try next year.

I feel like I’m still just trying to understand what my relationship is between making and the social aspect of my work. One thing I might also try to do here is work with the curator for the Cornell botanical gardens. She and her husband live at Treman State Park and have some property with a forest. We were talking about sugaring and climate resiliency. You can tap any deciduous tree; there’s just different sugar content which makes them less efficient. Ultimately, the sap would just boil longer. The production is highly variable, but she has proposed making a syrup that is just an Ithaca blend of all kinds of deciduous trees. To tap the trees, blend them, and see what it tastes like when we have this forest syrup rather than this kind of singular tree species syrup, even if it’s just a small batch and super experimental. All while weaving in [conversations of] climate resilience, decolonization, and care for the earth.

~

Photographs of FLUVIAL courtesy of Kurt Hager, 2020.