grass/roots, Rena L. Detrixhe

Rena L. Detrixhe is drawn to materials that retain stories from their original sources. The artist has said that she seeks a poetic understanding of time, material, history, and place, and her practice tries to reckon the human impact on and cultural relationships to the land. For grass/roots, Detrixhe planted wheat seeds in handmade, cotton paper and grew sprouts. She then dried and pressed the sprouts and their roots to display them as drawings rather than as a live-wheat installation. One row in the work shows the sprout side, while the other reveals the root side. The work invites the viewer to contemplate the lifecycle and history of a crop commonly associated with Kansas.