Melissa Wagner-Lawler: Artist in Residence at Biehl Nature Preserve
October 29, 2025 | Topics: featured artist
The Natural Realm presents Melissa Wagner-Lawler, who is among 10 artists participating in a year-long residency program called ARTservancy, now in its sixth year. ARTservancy is a collaboration between Gallery 224 in Port Washington and the Restoring Lands Land Trust, (formerly Ozaukee Washington Land Trust and River Revitalization Foundation). Milwaukee Area Land Conservancy, Tall Pines Conservancy, and Lake Michigan Bird Observatory. The mission of ARTservancy is to promote the visionary work of both the artists and conservationists. Each artist has selected a preserve to spend time in and to engage with.
Reflections from the Artist
For my ARTservancy residency, I wanted to use a site that was close to where I spent my teenage years as a way to reflect on the past and the idea of going home again. When I was sixteen, my family moved to the Town of Farmington, WI, a small township just north of West Bend. The town is situated near the Kettle Moraine State Park, a sprawling landscape whose roads I drove through frequently when I was young without much consideration for the geological formations that took place there.
The site that I chose is located within the Town of Farmington, the Biehl Nature Preserve. I wanted to give homage to a place close to what was once home and a place I truly didn’t appreciate when I lived there.
The work that I am creating for my ARTservancy exhibition is an artist book that is a narrative about my connection to this area, spanning from when I originally moved to the Town of Farmington as a teenager to present day. The artist book explores the passage of time, how time is marked in one’s life, and my desire to regain a connection to this place. Held together through a woven structure, the imagery in the book consists of letterpress printed birch wood veneer referencing the birch trees found throughout the Biehl Preserve. I also took photographs of the plant material on site to use as visual references and abstracted them to print as textures to move the viewer through the book space.
The woven structure of the book mimics the idea of how tenuously we can hold onto our past and upbringing and the way that humans move and meander through space. Visiting the preserve, I was struck by the land formations that were shaped thousands of years ago. The walking trails over the kames, the shape of Lake Twelve (which overlaps with the preserve), the way that manmade constructions evolve to the space. The marked pathways and pathway suggestions created by the curious.
In my work, I utilize landscape in a variety of ways. Often abstracted, I distill textures and patterns occurring in nature into shapes, pathways, backgrounds, foregrounds, and mark-making. Having photographed the plant life growing on site, I use digital tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate) to manipulate these images into plates for letterpress printing. Some of the plates are more vector-based translations, as represented in the artist book, while others will be more aligned with their original photographic nature, resulting in photogravure prints. The larger prints will be a reflection of the imagery in the book and will incorporate site marking information (trail maps, land formations, etc.).
The artist book also contains some prose written by me. The prose investigates the ways in which we mark time, the evolution of who I’ve become, and my desire to feel connected to the space. There’s also a nod to one particular visit to the site when I was besieged by a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitos. I was able to translate this experience into the way in which a place can feel unwelcoming, even though we desire to connect with it.
Here is the text as originally written that will be included in the artist book:
I remember feeling indifferent, like maybe something was supposed to change. Should this have felt monumental after 5,939 days on this planet? It’s a small shift perhaps. Most things stayed the same, except everything familiar was now further away. The minutes increased to hours.
Counting the distance in time, a very Midwest thing to do.
I became acclimated to country roads. Driving at night. Looking out for flashes of two small orbs. See it and slow down. One deer, at least three rabbits, one perfectly timed skunk. Sacrificed themselves to the metal of my Dodge. If it was dark, you didn’t stop. 5,939 days is too young to be on the road alone at night.
5,939 days seems like a lot but that was over 10,711 days ago.
Visiting a place that’s no longer close. An assignment. Feeling partially submerged again. Half absorbed. The only danger is the swarm. The depth is too shallow.The desire to feel something, become reconnected, all dashed by the swarm.
Driving away in the daylight, I dare not stop. They’ll all catch up to me.
16,650 days
The exhibition featuring my work inspired by the Biehl Nature Preserve will be on display at Gallery 224 during the months of January and February 2026, with the opening reception on January 24th.
Works in progress from the residency:
Gallery of previous works:
Bio
I am an artist and Teaching Faculty in the Printmaking & Book Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I received my BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. For over fifteen years, my practice has been dedicated to artist books and exploring the intricacies of the format. My artist books use letterpress and other printmaking techniques to investigate elements of tension, the breakdown of information and the fragility of circumstance. To date, I have produced fifteen editioned book works, all of which are housed within collections around the country.
My work has been exhibited widely and is held in over forty notable collections, including the Library of Congress Rare Book Collection, Stanford University, Bainbridge Museum of Art, Yale University and the Smithsonian American Art & Portraiture Library.
My work can be viewed at redthreadletterpress.com.
This residency is sponsored Restoring Lands: A Wisconsin Land Trust. Additional ARTservancy artists in residence at other sites can be found here.
For more information about Biehl Nature Preserve go to our Find-a-Park page.
Related stories:
David Niec: Artist in Residence at Lake Twelve Preserve.
Lisa Leick: Artist in Residence at Biehl Nature Preserve / Lake Twelve
Craig Grabhorn: Artist in Residence at Biehl Nature Preserve / Lake Twelve
This is the latest in our series of featured artists, which is intended to showcase the work of photographers, artists, writers and other creative individuals in our community whose subjects or themes relate in some broad sense to nature, urban nature, people in nature, etc. To see a list of previously featured artists, click here. The work of the 2022-2023 ARTservancy artists in residence is currently being exhibited monthly at Gallery 224. To meet the other ARTservancy artists in residence, click here and then use the drop-down menu.
All images courtesy of the artist, except as noted. The featured photo at the top of Melissa Wagner-Lawler at Biehl Nature Preserve is by Eddee Daniel. Restoring Lands is a project partner of A Wealth of Nature.
About Preserve Our Parks
Preserve Our Parks, Inc. is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of parks and green spaces. Our mission: To advocate for and promote Milwaukee area parks and open spaces and to strive to protect the tenets of Wisconsin’s Public Trust Doctrine.
For more than 25 years, we have been a leader in advocating for the protection of Milwaukee County park lands, halting many proposals to develop, privatize, or sell local parkland and lakefront spaces. More information about POP, including past accomplishments, is available at www.preserveourparks.org.