Kaye Savage






Dr. Kaye Savage, associate professor of Environmental Studies at Wofford College, lives her life at the intersection of science and art. While much of society fails to see the possible close proximity of these two roads, failing especially to notice their places of convergence, Savage’s education in both art and geology has provided her with experience in both spheres and has fostered her frequent mixing of the two. Ecological art first peaked her interest when she created a piece while in college that consisted of paper layered like a soil profile, each layer containing various organic materials that then grew both plants and mold. Since then, Ecological Art has become Savage’s primary genre of artistic expression.
Lately, Savage’s work has been very intentional in integrating science an art together. Receiving funding from Wofford College in the summer of 2015 to work on linking environmental art and science, Savage created a literature review examining the relationship between the two and then moved on to making her own examples of the connections. In one piece of art, Savage focused on showing how groundwater flows into a stream and that streams receive water not only from rainfall and runoff, but also from groundwater.

In another piece, “Four Lines,” Savage created four, two-dimensional panels, each depicting a line representing some sort of data related to Lawson’s Fork Creek in Glendale, South Carolina. One panel represents data collected by the stream gauges at the site, another panel contains a photo of the line left by a leaf miner bug as it traversed a leaf, the third panel shows an aerial image of the stream, and the final panel displays the flight path of dragonfly while hunting (which was a common phenomenon during Savage’s time working on this project). The third piece of Eco Art created for this particular science and art project also pertains to the stream gauge data and the wells at Lawson’s Fork, but the data is represented in a three-dimensional form. Creating hand-made paper, this piece shows the rise and fall of the water over the six days of a particular storm. “The sides of the profile are defined by water level in the wells, so you can see the relationship with the two. The wells respond more slowly to the influence of the storm, but much along the same pattern as the stream gauge” (Savage).
One of Savage’s favorite projects was completed several years ago along the trail at Glendale Shoals, located right beside Lawson’s Fork. Beginning by creating a mold, Savage made six different sculptures that resembled masks—not in the sense that they represented a face, but in the sense that they had the same sort of dimensionality as a face. The masks varied in complexity, ranging from very simple shapes to shapes based upon real objects, such as the larvae of a monarch butterfly. After making two casts with each mold, one with white paper and one with colored, the artist placed them on trees following the trail, ordering them so that when walking one direction, the masks progressed from the simplest form to the most complex, and then returning from the other direction, the colored casts progressed from the most complex to the most simple. “My goal was for people to wonder if they were natural or not because some of them looked like they could have been insect casings. This is where I really think this is Eco Art—I wanted people to start noticing something that they might otherwise not notice. If they’re going to look at the thing, then they’re also going to look at the tree and think about what is going on, making them more engaged as they are walking” (Savage). Though Savage does not consider her work to fall under the activism category of Eco Art, she classifies her work as a part of the genre because of her aim to bring awareness of nature to people observing her work in addition to her frequent interaction with nature and reliance on natural materials.
Savage does not see her involvement in the Eco Art sphere coming to an end any time soon. “I want to further this integration of science and art,” Savage said. “I identified eight different ways of interfacing, and so far I’ve only worked with two. I’d like to do some do some documentation of data with photography, use natural plant material from a site to make paper, and make charcoal and use that charcoal” (Savage). Savage has also considered representing data of the different densities of plated fecal-coliform bacteria by creating panels of images of the subject on colored, speckled, hand-made paper. A number of people have visited Savage’s various art exhibits around Spartanburg, South Carolina, but the artist has had a little difficulty gauging the audience reaction to certain pieces, specifically the tree mask project. Attempting to see what visitors thought of the pieces, she placed a notebook on the kiosk near the trail, but no one wrote in it about the art. Savage wanted people to notice the installations on their own, but without any prompting, the viewers were not motivated to write about their responses. However, some people did ask about the masks in person, and others sent emails to Savage telling her how much they enjoyed the exhibit.