Collaborations

All of these collaborations were made with her partner Lucas Farrell, a poet. They have been collaborating for over twenty years.

LMNOPs View works

An artist's book and photo-text series following a character named LMNOP through landscapes of longing and loss. Handwritten text circles, inverts, and runs alongside photographs — cornfields, forests, shadows, embroidered maps — building a narrative from the spaces between words and images. Published as a book. Also appears in Brooklyn.

Love Minus the Weather View works

A collaborative work made with Lucas Farrell during a three-month residency in Iceland, exhibited in To The Thawing Wind at the Freies Museum, Berlin, 2010. The show brought together artists whose work engages the poetry and precarity of frozen landscapes. Also appears in Iceland.

A Description of the Hook I am Capable Of View works

A collaborative piece with Lucas Farrell, written in Skagaströnd, Iceland, in October 2009 — occasioned by a hook found piercing a boot-bottom, made immediately into a gift. Published in Diagram 10.1. Also appears in Iceland.

A Field Guide to Icelandic Butterflies

A participatory art project conceived during a residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland, in 2009, connected to the International Day of Climate Action organized by 350.org. Participants from around the world were invited to invent and illustrate a butterfly species that might one day inhabit Iceland as the climate warms — imagining speculative ecological futures through the familiar form of a naturalist field guide. The project gathered submissions from classrooms in Japan, Taiwan, Vermont, and Iceland, and from individuals across the world. Each submission became a species plate in a collective archive. The goal was 350 imagined species, echoing the climate movement's symbolic number of 350 ppm atmospheric CO₂.

About

Louisa Conrad is a visual artist whose work begins with sustained attention to a place — and to the forces, environmental and political, that are quietly transforming it. Working across photography, drawing, installation, and video, she builds projects from research: weeks in the Canadian Arctic tracing a proposed gas pipeline, months in rural Iceland following fishermen and glaciers, years on a Vermont goat farm learning what it means to know a season from the inside. From the collapse of the Chinook salmon and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to the deglaciation of Iceland and the dying of a Vermont pasture in October, her practice has long asked what it looks like to document something disappearing — and what forms are adequate to that task.

Conrad draws on her training in both anthropology and the visual arts to create work that resists easy resolution. The resulting projects are meditative and formally rigorous, often combining found documents, hand-drawn marks, and analog photographs into layered arguments about ecology, legibility, and loss.

She lives and farms at Big Picture Farm in Townshend, Vermont — a goat dairy and artisanal creamery she runs with her partner Lucas Farrell — where the farm itself has become both subject and collaborator.

Conrad received her MFA from CalArts in photography and media and her BA from Middlebury College in sociology and anthropology. Her work has been exhibited at Exit Art in New York, LACE in Los Angeles, Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, the Freies Museum in Berlin, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, The Gallery at UTA in Arlington, Texas, and for many years at Anthony Greaney in Boston.

Contact

For inquiries about work, commissions, or exhibitions, please write to
[email protected]

Farm Life

Louisa Conrad and her husband Lucas Farrell started Big Picture Farm in Townshend, Vermont in 2010. The farm is home to 45 goats, a couple dozen hens, a dozen barn cats, two dogs, and two daughters — and produces handcrafted goat milk caramels and chocolates. The farm is also the subject of an ongoing body of visual work — illustration, photography, and video — that attends to the daily rhythms, animals, and landscape of this particular place in southern Vermont.

The Workers View works

Portraits of the goats and sheep at Big Picture Farm — the animals whose daily labor, alongside Louisa and Lucas's own, produces the milk, the caramels, the landscape. Named, known, particular.

Field Studies

Ongoing drawings and studies of the farm's animals — close observation rendered in ink and watercolor, attending to the specific gesture and character of each creature.

Chores

Chores is a video installation first shown in Shifting Terrain: Landscape Video at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, July–September 2011. A collection of intimate and carefully composed clips, it follows the daily rhythms of Big Picture Farm — the morning and afternoon cycle of feeding, milking, trimming, bedding — at the pace those tasks actually unfold. The word chore derives from the Old English meaning "to turn" or "to convert," and that etymology is at the heart of the piece: through the labor of farmers and the work of foraging animals, weather, soil, and flora, a landscape is made consumable. The video moves between brief haiku-like clips and longer, more meditative passages, tracing a seasonal arc from winter snow through the arrival of spring lambs and fresh grass — teetering between romantic pastoralism and the absolute mundane, finding in the ordinary tasks of a particular place something singular and alive.

Gertrude, the Retired Goat

— children's picture book, in progress —

The Last Arctic

Photographs, drawings, and installation work made during research trips to the Canadian Arctic and subarctic, tracing a proposed gas pipeline corridor through the Mackenzie Valley. The work asks what it looks like to document a landscape on the edge of irreversible transformation — and what forms are adequate to that task.

The Last Arctic View works

Disintegration: A Catalogue of Arctic Flowers

Man on Water

— video —

Beneath a Petroliferous Moon

— Saskatoon show + book —

Unfinished Bridge

A research blog kept during the making of The Last Arctic, 2008–9. An accumulation of newspaper clippings, scientific papers, pipeline impact assessments, satellite maps, and field photographs documenting the proposed Mackenzie Gas Pipeline and the forces bearing down on the Canadian subarctic. The blog is a work in its own right — a public archive of the research that underlies the photographs and drawings.

Iceland

Work made during extended residencies in Iceland — in Seydisfjördur on the eastern fjords, and in Skagaströnd on the northern coast. These projects follow fishermen, glaciers, and the particular quality of light and silence that attends a landscape being remade by warming.

Love Minus the Weather View works

A collaborative work made with Lucas Farrell during a three-month residency in Iceland, exhibited in To The Thawing Wind at the Freies Museum, Berlin, 2010. The show brought together artists whose work engages the poetry and precarity of frozen landscapes.

A Description of the Hook I am Capable Of

A collaborative piece with Lucas Farrell, written in Skagaströnd, Iceland, in October 2009 — occasioned by a hook found piercing a boot-bottom, made immediately into a gift. Published in Diagram 10.1.

Seydisfjördur

Photographs made in and around Seydisfjördur, a small town on Iceland's eastern fjords. Light, mountains, water, and the texture of a place that feels genuinely remote.

Fish Detective

A thread running from Los Angeles through the Pacific Northwest and into Iceland, following the collapse of wild salmon populations — the Chinook in Oregon, the Atlantic salmon in Iceland — and the political and ecological forces driving it. The work moves between documentary and lyric modes, between field research and studio making.

Instress View works

Work made in the Pacific Northwest tracing the collapse of the Chinook salmon — drawings, photographs, and found documents assembled around the question of what a species disappearing looks like from the inside.

Sitka

Documentation and drawings from Sitka, Alaska, where Conrad attended a residency focused on the relationship between salmon ecology, Indigenous land use, and industrial fishing. Work made at the confluence of the Sitka Sound.

Los Angeles

Work made during MFA studies at CalArts, 2006–7, and years of living in the city. Los Angeles as walked, driven, collected, mapped, and gradually understood.

Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map View works

A body of work made during Louisa's graduate studies at CalArts, 2006–7, while her partner Lucas was completing an MFA in poetry at the University of Montana in Missoula. Over the course of a year, she built two opposing wall maps — one of Los Angeles, one of Missoula — using materials gathered from daily movements through the city: orange rinds, pomegranate seeds, charcoal from forest fires, fallen petals, bits of debris. The photographs document the installation's growth, shifting between the aerial and the intimate, tracking the transformation of landscape into memory and distance into form.

Little Do They Know

Drawings and photographs made in Los Angeles during the CalArts years — moths, blueprints, scanned objects — a quieter, more intimate thread running alongside the wall installations.

Brooklyn

Work made in Brooklyn, c. 2006, between the Art Farm residency in Nebraska and MFA studies at CalArts.

Square Cloud Factory View works

Installation and studio work made in Brooklyn, c. 2006 — drawings on walls, maps of imaginary places, objects arranged into temporary geographies.

LMNOPs

An artist's book and photo-text series following a character named LMNOP through landscapes of longing and loss. Handwritten text circles, inverts, and runs alongside photographs — cornfields, forests, shadows, embroidered maps — building a narrative from the spaces between words and images. Published as a book.

Early Work

Work made during residencies at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska (2005) and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont (2007).

Fields We Have Known View works

Work made during a residency at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, 2005. Surrounded by endless fields of corn and prairie grass, Conrad spent long periods braiding grass and working with corn tassels in her studio — transforming the raw material of the Great Plains landscape into intimate acts of attention. The photographs and drawings that emerged reckon with agricultural land as both fact and feeling.

2007, Studio Installation at the Vermont Studio Center

Installation work made during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Using collected organic materials — milkweed, dried grasses, seeds, lichen, and wool — Conrad built floor and wall-based landscape poems that dissolve the boundary between specimen and scene.