Jillian
Ballas
Seattle, WA, USA
As an artist, Jillian Ballas gathers inspiration from the environment around her and the adventures she has had within it. Being lucky enough to grow up in the Pacific Northwest, her work is inspired by the experiences she has had exploring the wild landscapes of the west coast. This early exposure led her down a path that would shape who she would become and the artwork she would create. With the Cascade Mountains, Puget Sound, and the valleys in between as her muse, Ballas recreates the wonders she sees within each of them. Being deeply rooted to the natural landscapes around her, Ballas’ artwork focuses on the complex relationships between humanity and nature. Through her work, she hopes to study and discover the threads that connect us to nearby ecosystems. Her practice has recently evolved to be inquisitive about the notion of wilderness, reflecting and questioning the definitions and symbolic meanings both she and others have placed on nature in western culture.
Getting inspiration from the environmental art movement as well as her own experience, she creates works that have an almost nostalgic essence to them. Like a moment captured in time, her sculptures and drawings use the past as a tool to speak about the present/future. No matter the medium, her work has an environmental edge that challenges mass culture and our attitudes towards our Earth.
In her recent project, ‘The River’ Ballas narrates the story of a wild river. From the River's origin in a high glacial lake, to its journey through the mountains and valleys of Washington State, she gives the viewer a glimpse into the dynamic world of rivers and our deep and tumultuous relationship to them. Illustrated with a 23 ft. long charcoal painting, Ballas accompanies the imagery with the telling of the River’s story and a collage of recorded sounds sourced from nearby rivers and landscapes.
Statement from the Artist
The river has always played an important role in my life. Whether I am hiking to the river’s origin; a trajectory that leads me through temperate forests of salal and cedar, before reaching pale blue glaciers; or exploring its many sandbars filled with piles of driftwood and young saplings, the river has and will always be, a place of solace and connection for me. Through all four seasons I would get to know the rivers of the North Cascades. It is through these long days of exploration that I learned to appreciate the many personalities of nature and to be gracious for the close proximity to the wilderness that I grew up in.
It wasn’t till I was older that I began to understand that the majority of the rivers in the world were unlike the ones back home. Bordered by concrete and drained, many rivers in the world are faded impressions of what they used to be. It was through these observations that I wanted to understand how they got this way. Why were rivers drying up and the biodiversity within them disappearing and what could we do about it?
Although it would be all too easy to get caught up in the negativity of it all, I wanted to present a narrative where redemption was possible. Though it may seem too late to restore the rivers of the world (and for some that may be true), we won’t know unless we try.
I hope that this story of the “wild” river inspires you to consider your own local river and your relationship with it. What can you do to make these essential waterways flow freely again?