Anne Yoncha

Anne Yoncha (US) is currently Assistant Professor of Art + Painting Area Coordinator at Metropolitan State University Denver. She was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. After earning her MFA at the University of Montana in 2019, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, working with restorationists to make collaborative art-science work about former peat extraction sites outside Oulu. Her practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog, traditional processes including painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter. Her ongoing research with the HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting) working group began in Fall 2019 at Field_Notes, a residency of Finland’s Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in subarctic Lapland, where she worked with artists, biologists, and programmers to detect high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite. Outside the studio she can often be found doing another kind of environmental “research” via bicycle.

My work combines experimental art + ecological science to explore mechanics of plant physiology. By translating these processes into artworks, I aim to build affinity with unfamiliar ecologies apparently out of sight or possessing different temporalities than our own. My practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog processes including painting with ink I make from locally-sourced plant matter – so the materials used in the piece add another layer of data. I have lately been interested in the agency of non-human neighbors and how to make work in collaboration with soil and air-borne microbes.