Artist Statement
My art process addresses memory, history, place and the body. Collaborating with the landscape through site specific interventions is an integral part of my practice. The essence of any space or place is installed within its past. Researching the history of the land along with the flora and fauna of the area are critical steps in my process of accessing its story. Like our bodies, the land contains memories and even trauma, but it can also heal. Architect Leslie Kanes Weisman stated that we need to, “reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us.” An awareness that I often meditate on and put into action through my photographed interventions and with my fire paintings.

Fire Talks, my most current work utilizes the element of fire while I learn from land and fire how to reindiginize myself and work towards being a good steward of the land I call River Place. The local Roanoke River continuously brings organic matter in all shapes and sizes towards my house. I often interpret this as an offering, as a collaboration, to shift & transform, to generate bon fires much like those in Nordic and Celtic traditions celebrating the midsummers eve or Native American traditions that utilize fires to balance and maintain the local ecosystem.

Fire Talks consists of photographs of my ritualistic performances where my body is often ghosted as I work with time and fire. The project also consists of paintings where I converse with fire through mark making. Burns, smoke, charcoal, and sometimes dirt make their way onto the paper as fire and I work to converse with each other. In collaborating I work to become egoless, so that the land has agency once again. I am rewriting the story handed to me at birth and facilitating a healing shift through the process of making the Fire Talks project.

Bio
Donna Cooper is a visual and community engaged artist living in Virginia, USA. She holds a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has also been taking ecopsychology and eco-literacy courses to expand her understanding of identity and the environment. Photography, sculpture, and performance are utilized as she collaborates with the energies of place. Her photographs and paintings depict a sliver of time of a much larger process that expresses a deeper ecology of mind.

Some of the highlighted institutions that have exhibited Cooper’s work have been the Chicago Cultural Center, The New Orleans Museum of Art, the FAC Modern in Colorado, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. On an international level, she has shown at La Porte Peinte Center, in Noyers, France, and at the Rathfarnham Castle in Dublin, Ireland, presented by PhotoIreland and Cow House Studios. Cooper has been awarded a variety of artist residencies in the last few years that have allowed her to travel and expand her explorations into the energies of other places. Her most recent residency in 2024 was at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida.