Welcome to Fieldwork

Something new is taking shape...

You may remember me. I'm Iris. I spent five wonderful years at Fischer Arts, my lovely gallery on the Chester green. I had an open, welcoming space full of work inspired by nature. On the last day I stood in the emptied-out gallery, still, filled with gratitude for the wonderful friends I made, and for the time spent in that peaceful place.

The gallery did not close for any lack of love. If anything, the opposite.

My path has always been, to put it kindly, a little meandering. I trained as a veterinarian. I spent years in research, following marine mammals and shorebirds around and trying to understand how they make sense of the world. I became a college professor. Somewhere along the way I picked up a camera and never put it down.

One thread runs through every single version of me: I look closely at the natural world, and I can never quite keep it to myself. The gallery was one way of doing that. Teaching and research... another. The photography turned out to be another still.

Last year in particular, my academic work grew. Research and travel started calling again. My family needed more of me, especially my mother, who is the reason I have any gallery-owning in my blood in the first place. I found myself closing the gallery far more often than I was opening it, and a gallery cannot live behind a locked door. So, I handed the space to someone who could give it what I no longer could.

Nature has always been the thing that keeps me afloat. Art is one way I hold onto it and pass it on. Neither was ever going to leave me. They only needed a shape that could travel with the rest of my full, loud, meandering life.

Which brings me to the next step.

My husband and I have been working on our home in the hills of Southern Vermont. Yes, I admit, on top of everything else in our lives, we took on a several-year project ourselves. We are now at the last stages (goodness gracious, even writing this makes me tired). But friends, it is such a joy. I can't believe I am saying this, but there is one last space. And it is a doozy. A giant and beautiful empty timber-framed room, with alcoves and turrets (oh my).

For the final push, we needed help. Two kind friends who (lucky us) happen to be extremely talented contractors (and musicians! Check them out here) - are now more than halfway through making the space pretty darn magical.

My husband, for those who don't know, has more skills than I can count. He is smart, the good kind of weird, funny, crazy, strong, and pretty darn visionary. He has taken his engineering background and applied it to home construction (look at his business, Tileworks of Vermont, to see the evidence). Together with our friends, the gorgeous final room is coming together. The bones are almost in, thanks to all of them.

But the finishing touches (she says, cackling just a little bit...) are mine.

And that is what gets my heart going "thumpity thump".

I get the blank canvas. I decide what goes on the walls, how the room greets you when you walk in, where the light catches and falls...

I cannot yet tell you everything this space will become. I am letting it reveal itself, which for a planner like me is roughly as comfortable as having sand in my socks. So, while I wait for this, I am out here on the internet, building the other half of it.

I am calling it Fieldwork.

I didn’t choose the name to sound poetic. Fieldwork is simply the word for what I have always done. It is the actual term for the work of a field scientist. You go out into the world, you look carefully at something wild, and you bring back a record of what you saw.

I did this on boats and coastlines for years. I am still doing it now, with a camera instead of a field notebook, pointed at the birds, the water, and the natural beauty of my surroundings.

There are connections and coincidences everywhere. The antique natural history prints I collect are fieldwork too. Someone stood in a meadow centuries ago, looked closely at a single plant, and made a record of it by hand, long before anyone could photograph a thing.

A living artist painting a shoreline today is doing the same.

Fieldwork gathers all of it under one roof: my own photographs, prints made by naturalists centuries before me, and contemporary work by artists who so skillfully capture what they see.

Different hands, different centuries, one stubborn habit: Go out, look closely, bring something back. Some of the records are mine. All of them come from someone who paid attention to the natural world and refused to look away. It is the gallery's next life.

It has been a full, loud, occasionally overwhelming stretch of life. A great many decisions. A great many sleepless nights. But I keep coming back to that empty gallery, and how in the end it did not feel like walls being emptied so much as walls waiting to be filled again.

So here I am, filling them. Grateful, a little terrified, and very glad you came.

Welcome to Fieldwork.