V A N E S S A M A R S H

Vanessa Marsh (b.1978, Seattle, Washington) is a Portland, OR-based visual artist. Marsh creates imaginary landscapes and atmospheres through a mixed-media process based in photography. Working in various photographic processes she creates the illusion of a layered and dimensional landscape using opaque stencils and cut paper to make multiple exposures on light-sensitive materials. She has translated this process into different forms of photographic printmaking, from traditional black and white darkroom prints to analog color printing, wet plate collodion, lumen, and cyanotype. Reflecting upon the landscapes of her life in the Western United States, the images she creates are meditations on memory, climate change, and geologic time.

She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2004 and her BA from Western Washington University in 2001. Marsh’s work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at venues including Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, The San Jose Museum of Art, The SFO Museum, The Penumbra Foundation in New York, photoEye Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, and The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Marsh has been the recipient of a Penland School of Craft Winter Residency (2023), a Jentel Foundation Fellowship (2018), a Rayko Photo Center residency (2014), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2007), and a Headlands Center for the Arts MFA Fellowship (2004). Marsh’s images are held in institutional collections including the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Francisco Art Commission, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. 

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The Sun Beneath the Sky is a series of cameraless photographic landscapes made using a lumen photogram print process. Each unique lumen photogram is made by selectively exposing silver gelatin paper to sunlight using multiple exposures and cut paper masks. I consider the sun to be my collaborator in the process and understanding the intensity of the light as affected by time of day, time of year and my place on the planet helps me to capture the sunlight in various ways.

The series takes the subject of granite mountain ranges; landscapes that evoke solidity, magnitude and wonder and transforms them into something ethereal and transparent. As individuals we experience nature in such a way as to give us the impression of unending bounty and infinite natural resources, something we can take from without effect. However, when applied on a grand scale we end up where we are today, on the brink of environmental catastrophe. I create these images to highlight that these landscapes are part of a living system of interconnected, and sometimes fragile parts, even as it may seem grandiose on an individual level.

The titles serve to ground the work in a sense of earthliness, referencing real mountains as well as other landmarks like remote fire lookouts, lakes, rivers and trails. Reflecting upon the landscapes of my life in the Western United States, the images are a meditation on memory, climate change and geologic time. While these works have a calming and dreamlike quality, they also point to an unsettling beauty, like landscape seen through the haze of wildfire smoke. The images are amalgamations of various landscapes merged to create new, dreamlike places which references the shifting nature of the natural world as well as of memory and perception.