The artist duo Sayler/Morris, consisting of Edward Morris (left) and Susannah Sayler (right).

Portfolio: https://www.sayler-morris.com

Social media: https://www.instagram.com/saylermorris/

Biosketch:

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) work with photography, video, writing, and installation to examine our changing notions of nature, culture, and ecology. Their work is often place-based and focused on historical research. They were jointly awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

Their work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Belvedere Museum, the Museum of Capitalism and the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art.  They have been awarded numerous fellowships in addition to the Guggenheim, including the New York Artist Fellowship, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Center for Art and Environment Research Fellowship, and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design. They are currently teaching in the Film and Media Arts department at Syracuse University.  Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art / Reno, Center for Art and Environment.

In 2006, Sayler/Morris co-founded The Canary Project, a studio that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and other ecological issues. In 2020, they founded Toolshed, a platform for connecting ecological thought and action.

  Sayler/Sayler/Morris, Prophecy of Butterflies, Full view, all quadrants together, 2023.

I met the artist duo Sayler/Morris, also known as Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, in the fall of 2024 in my Gen AI and Photography class at Penumbra.

Prior to this class, back in October 2019, when I joined the Counterforce Lab at UCLA Design Media Arts, I researched ecologically-minded initiatives across the United States and found the Canary Project they co-founded. Our respective missions were strikingly similar: engage with and execute projects about the ecological crisis through critical approaches to landscape, research, fieldwork, and teaching.

We bonded over our shared concern for humanity in the ecological crisis and had fun exploring the potential of generative AI in embracing subjects of planetary scale, a marker of the time we live in.

What follows is a transcription of our March 2025 interview.

Yogan Muller: Was there a particular impetus–a book, a report, an event, or a piece of information–that first compelled you to engage with the ecological crisis and ultimately commit to it as a central focus in your work?

Sayler/Morris (Morris): That’s a very easy question to answer because there was a very clear book that galvanized us. It was a series of articles first in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert. The series of articles was called “The Climate of Man” (2005), which was later collected into a book called Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006). What those articles and the book did to us was to bring us out of this situation where climate was merely in the background of our minds. So our concern with ecology grows out of a concern with climate.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “The Climate of Man,” The New Yorker, April 18, 2005. Courtesy of The New Yorker. Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/25/the-climate-of-man-i

Cover of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes From a Catastrophe, 2006

This was in 2006, a little before Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth. We were at a moment where climate was burbling around in the news but hadn’t risen to this level of an emergency – or a crisis – in people’s minds. Elizabeth Kolbert’s articles brought home what scientists were thinking and how severe what they were seeing was. That awakened us to a real discrepancy between scientific understanding andpublic understanding, and therefore also between public understanding and political will. And so we started thinking about how to address that, not necessarily in our artwork per se, but just how to address that as humans. And it turned out that thinking about an art project made the most sense for us in our situation. And so we designed a photography project.

Sayler: Elizabeth Kolbert has been really important throughout our career. We became friends and have done other projects that have followed her writing. In 2006, it was before the release of An Inconvenient Truth, which was a bizarrely successful film. 50 million people went to see it, or it made $50 million at the box office. Anyway, it was bizarrely successful, considering it was a film showing Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation. At one point, he gets on a lift. He has this big graph behind him, showing CO2 and temperatures rising together. He gets on the lift to make that point, and he’s high above the ground. It’s a very vulnerable but also absurd moment, and the crowd is laughing. It’s this kind of incredible moment where people are laughing, but at the same time, it’s sort of terrifying. It’s terrifying to see a man up on this lift.

Courtesy: Al Gore / https://youtu.be/9tkDK2mZlOo?si=Qmyhw1REJOIpHrTG

He looks kind of vulnerable up there. He looks so small. And at the same moment, there’s this nervous laughter in the audience. Seeing that was also impactful for me in trying to think about the emotions around this issue and how difficult comprehension is.

Morris: From the beginning, we were interested in the discrepancy between scientific understanding and emotional understanding.

Sayler: Right, how can that data visualization, which was all we had visually at the time, be represented in ways that allow people to think and feel about the ecological issues?

Muller: Is this when you started collaborating?

Morris: We had done a couple of stray projects together.

Sayler: So since we met, was it?

Morris: Oh, right. Yeah, since we met. That’s right. We are going way back to 1994.

Sayler: We met in college.

Morris: I was writing a thesis in the English department, and decided to do an art show instead of a written thesis, and Susannah and I collaborated on that show. So we had done fun collaborations that weren’t life-altering in terms of how we worked together. We really started intensively collaborating on the Canary Project. That was 2006.

Design for Sayler/Morris’ The Canary Project website: https://canary-project.org/

Muller: Do you embrace the phrase “ecological crisis?” Or is there an alternative that you find more fitting and productive for us artists?

Morris: Certainly, we embrace the word ecology now and think very much in terms of ecology and various ecological crises: species extinction, the climate crisis, etc., which are all, in a sense, different types of crises. For us, it’s an evolution to get from the climate crisis to the ecological crisis. And it’s an evolution in thinking. It’s an evolution in our political and cultural situation as well.

Muller: I enjoyed rediscovering your work to prepare for our conversation today. What I found inspiring is the strong documentary base and the physical, processual, almost sensual overlay and mode of presentation in your work. Not to mention all the relationships you create between words, images, prints, media, objects, and books in your large-scale installations. There’s a lot of undercurrents. I see connections, speculation, and extensions among other modalities. Can you speak to your relationship with documentary photography and how you approach its limitations? What drives you to expand beyond them?

Sayler/Morris, Terminus, Installation view, Grunwald Gallery of Art, U. of Indiana, 2009

Sayler/Morris, Terminus, Installation view, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2009

Morris: Originally, we set out to show what global warming looks like. But it wasn’t long before we realized that’s somewhat of a naive notion in the sense that a photographic image is just an instant, while we’re talking about long-scale geologic processes. So no matter what, there’s an implied context to the image. As we’ve progressed in our practice and careers and as we thought about these things more deeply, we’re always thinking about what the image says and what we need to say around the image–but not oversay–so the image still functions in and of itself. We’re constantly experimenting with that.

Sayler: The initial project we started collaborating on was A History of the Future. We very much approached it as a documentary project. There was a series of locations and a set of criteria in terms of what kinds of specific climate change impacts we were going to look at. This project was very much informed by scientific peer-reviewed research, working with scientists in the field–sometimes following the pointing finger of a scientist, and communicating with scientists before we went. So I would say it was a fairly rigorous process. There was very much a documentary impulse, and it was a little bit later, as we started to try to edit and exhibit the work, that we realized more and more how we were going to have to experiment to draw out all this background that is there.

Sayler/Morris, Extreme Weather Events XXIV: Manhattan, NY, 2012. Archival pigment print, 40” x 50”. Blackout after Hurricane Sandy. From A History of the Future series.

Morris: It also came out in the editing process because we realized that we were attracted to images that weren’t necessarily straightforwardly documentary in the sense of trying to show a climate change impact, where you want to maximize the immediate readability of the image. Like ‘Here’s a burning tree!”, or “Here’s some soil that’s cracking!,” and so on. There’s a very clear use of that kind of picture, and there’s a lot of that kind of picture. We felt more drawn to images with a more pensive, allegorical quality.

Sayler/Morris, Rising Sea Level XV: San Michele Cemetery, Venice, Italy, 2007. Archival pigment print, 40” x 50”

Sayler/Morris, Glacial, Icecap and Permafrost Melting VIII: Margaritzen Reservoir, Hohe Tauern National Park, Austria, 2005. Archival pigment print, 40” x 50”. From A History of the Future series.

Muller: It makes me think of how overwhelming climate change is, and at the same time, how diffuse a phenomenon it is. As ecologically minded artists, I’m sure that we share this preoccupation of knowing what’s happening, often feeling like we’re among the few people to see and care, while going to great lengths to make work about it. I wonder how you navigate the gap between your acute awareness of the crisis and people’s absence of concern?

Sayler: That’s a great question.

Morris: That is a great question. I think most people are aware of the climate crisis. This is going back to that moment that galvanized us, where we went from being aware to being extremely concerned. And I’ve seen other friends go through that same process at different points in their lives. But it’s almost always coming to some kind of emotional understanding rather than an intellectual or rational understanding, that truly changes them. That’s why when we started editing the photographs of locations we’d been to, we were most drawn to images that had that pensive quality, something that can pierce the viewer and connect on some emotional level. Then, we combined these pictures with all the data and topics we’ve heard about climate change and produced this more urgent response, which I think is a full understanding of the issue.

Sayler/Morris, Terminus, installation view, Grunwald Gallery of Art, U. of Indiana, 2009

Sayler: But at the same moment, we fully accept that no one, including ourselves, lives with this knowledge in a full emotional way on a day-to-day basis. We wouldn’t be able to even get up in the morning. In other words, you move forward with it and try to honestly feel, and yet, on some level, we don’t understand the crisis because of its immensity. For example, circling back to the Canary Project, our impulse came out of us feeling that there needed to be a community of artists working on the ecological crisis. We felt isolated and didn’t even really know other people working on it. There was also a need for community in part because, back then, the art world was such that if you got pigeonholeed into being an activist artist, that could be bad for your career. These were different times.

Muller: I noticed that your project titles often play with peaks and endings. For example: Terminus, Next of Kin, Eclipse, Threshold, The End and the Myth, to name just a few. I resonate because my work also contemplates endings in the context of the ecological crisis. What do endings symbolize for you, and what metaphors do they harbor in your work?

Morris: That’s a fascinating question. No one’s ever asked us. I didn’t even notice that about our work. I think that’s unconscious. What it brings to mind is the extent to which we’re living in the end times. Timothy Morton writes about how we’re already living in the end times. The end has already happened in a way. I think that’s true,  to some extent, whether it’s literally true or not, that is the feeling of where we are. I’m reading a book right now about the letters of Paul, from the New Testament, and it’s a book by Giorgio Agamben called The Time That Remains, and it’s thinking about messianic time, which Walter Benjamin also writes about. We’ve always resonated with the work of Walter Benjamin. Sometimes people who like Benjamin have trouble, I think, dealing with or coping with the fact that everything that underlies his writing is this messianic sensibility. You’re living in the end times, the time that remains. We are in an epochal moment. It’s hard to deny that.

Sayler/Morris, End Use, archival pigment print with text, 56” x 60,” 2015. From the series Water, Gold, Soil.

Sayler/Morris, Water, Gold, Soil installation view, David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA, 2016.

Sayler: You point something out that I don’t think we were necessarily consciously aware of. I thank you for that.

Morris: I think it’s just something we’re fascinated with, like the future anterior tense, which I think maybe French has a better grasp of than English. This sense of “you’re in the future looking back to the past.” That’s the history of the future. That’s already implied in our title of the project. I think that’s a tone of voice, or a position, that we try and project ourselves into artistically.

Sayler: I think that also comes out of the real embodied experience of being in a landscape and having some intimation of geological time.

Sayler/Morris, Glacial, Icecap and Permafrost Melting XXXVI: Bellingshause Base, King George Island, Antarctica, 2008. Archival pigment print, 40” x 50”. From the series A History of the Future.

Muller: On a different note, we’re educators so I’m hard-pressed to ask you how teaching nurtures your ecologically-minded artistic practice and research.

Morris: Well, in two ways. One is to make us read stuff, which is good because we have to assign the material we read ourselves. We also both reread things that we’ve read before, which always provides new insights. Both of us try and challenge ourselves to refresh our syllabi and come up with new courses pretty frequently, almost every year. So sometimes we use the courses almost as a research opportunity. In other words, we’re learning along with the students. The other way it nurtures us is that you learn from the students. I think that’s particularly vital. You learn from them, and you also keep in touch with how different generations are experiencing these same problems.

Sayler/Morris talk to students about Sayler’s use of photographs to address issues of climate change. Caption and photo courtesy of Chris Meyer.

Sayler teaching, Syracuse University.

Sayler: I find it to be very moving to work with students as they are coming into this knowledge, or maybe a more mature understanding of ecology and ecological crisis. I’ve also shifted a little bit in the last couple of years in the tenor of how I’m teaching this material. I feel like I have a maybe slightly lighter touch in a way. I’m asking them to do more work that is about considering their relations to the world around them, while trying to step a little bit more lightly on the catastrophe side, because I feel that can just shut humans down. I’m trying to be more cognizant of how we engage and how we think about ecology in terms of relationality.

Morris: I do think that any kind of ecological awareness begins with grief. Even though the market research doesn’t seem to suggest that’s an appropriate trigger to hit, I still think that’s where it begins. Anyone who’s made this journey from ecological problems as a peripheral news item to being at the core has gone through that kind of grief stage. And I think it’s important as artists to keep that in mind and to continue to provide testimony to that, provide occasion for that. Simultaneously, I agree with Susannah that the grief impulse is being provided elsewhere now, which means we don’t need to be the ones, necessarily, to provide it to the students. I think it was fairly recently that the students already seem to be coming with that built in, rather than having to provide it. The other thing about teaching is that it’s another sphere of activism in a way because you’re working with students who are in the process of transformation, of forming their identities. They’re in mental-state flux, and I think that’s a great time to meet people and to experience the world relationally. That is the transition, right? Going from the climate crisis to the broader ecological crisis is about going from a scientific data problem to a problem of relationality. How do we cultivate relationality? The classroom is such an intimate and great way to do that experientially.

Muller: We met in a Gen AI class at Penumbra last fall. I know a lot of artists who are wary of AI, and for good reasons, I must add. But you’ve embraced it all. I’m curious to know how you work with AI and its gluttonous ecology of images.

Morris: It’s a good description. We’re not unafraid of it, but there are also a lot of delights in working with it. For us, it’s fascinating that it somehow reflects the aggregate of human efforts to make images. It learns from human images. Increasingly, it learns from its own produced images. But it’s always in relation to the human imagination, right? In some ways, we like it for that. In other ways, there’s a wildness to it that is appealing.

Sayler: I like the way that we have used it so far in this particular project, which is an effort to represent the Amazon, this vast, unrepresentable entity. We’re using it in the service of that project. AI becomes a metaphor for all the things that contribute to what the Amazon is: not this pristine place over here on the map, but a whole set of global forces. AI has that within it as well. It’s not a tool you can pick up and put away because it has this entire global life that is simultaneously metabolic and horrific.

Morris: It takes a hyper object to know a hyper object.

Sayler: Go make a bumper sticker! Ed just summed it up in four words, or however many words that was.

Sayler/Morris, AI experiments, from the series Crystal Forest (2023-Current)

Muller: I’m already ordering some stickers! That’s a good transition to the next question about Crystal Forest, a four-fold project combining archival research, collage, botanical objects, photographic field work, video, and AI. One of them is the Prophecy of Butterflies, which sounds like a harbinger of change, but I wonder what change, and what prophecy? As a follow-up: How do you envision Crystal Forest’s final presentation, are you working on a book that compiles all four chapters?

Sayler/Morris, Manifest collage, from the series Crystal Forest, 16” x 20,” 2023.

Morris: If we knew, maybe it wouldn’t be as interesting. I don’t know what the prophecy of butterflies is, but I think it’s along the following lines. There is a famous quote from Thoreau that often gets misquoted, which is: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” It’s wildness in that sentence that interests me because Thoreau should have said something more like “the wildness will be preserved as the world.” . In other words, wildness will persist. Whatever the Amazon becomes, even if it gets completely deforested, there will be wildness. The untameable wild aspect of the Amazon interests us. The Prophecy of Butterflies work came about in the context of this show on the Amazon that Joe Thompson was putting together and he was searching for a title. I don’t remember what the various titles were, but they were more celebratory of the diversity of the Amazon or dramatizing of the destruction of it. And I was like: “the Amazon is going to survive no matter what.” And Joe ultimately changed the title to Enduring Amazon, which I think is more apt, more interesting. I think that’s the prophecy. No matter what humans do, the butterflies will have the last word in a way. Wildness and beauty will have the last word.

Sayler: That piece, The Prophecy of Butterflies, while we wanted to work with AI in making that particular piece, we did not. It’s CGI. We were already kind of thinking along the lines of it takes a hyper object to know a hyper object: how would AI behave in this space? We did a considerable amount of field work in the Amazon, and were influenced by a book by Eduardo Viveros de Castro on Indigenous worldviews that have a much broader understanding of nonhuman communication.

Sayler/Morris, Prophecy of Butterflies, Multi-channel video installation, The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, November 18, 2023 – April 7, 2024

Sayler/Morris, Prophecy of Butterflies, Multi-channel video installation, OACF, Brooklyn, NY 2025

Sayler/Morris, Prophecy of Butterflies, Multi-channel video installation, OACF, Brooklyn, NY 2025

Morris: I’m glad you mentioned this book by Viveiros de Castro because we’ve been trying to think about the degree to which, as white Westerner settler people, we can learn from Indigenous worldviews. It’s been noted that there is a harmony between contemporary ecological philosophers and Indigenous thought. I think there’s something of the Indigenous thought involved in that prophecy of the butterflies, which cuts to the core of considering: what is a being? What is kin? Does the forest think? You can feel it as a living, breathing organism around you that has many constituent parts, trees and the animals within it, but it is a super organism, and you’re an alien. You’re like a cancer or some kind of malignant being when you walk into the Amazon, and it wants to expel you. The Crystal Forest project as a whole is about how the forest itself thinks and how we may represent it. That’s why AI is useful because there is an alienness and a foreignness and a wildness to AI itself that might have an insight we do not possess on our own.

Sayler/Morris, Untitled, from the series Crystal Forest, 2023-Current.

Muller: What does being a photographer in a warming world mean to you?

Morris: Being a photographer specifically, right? Being a photographer is a particular focus, I think. Our practice continues to be photographic-based, meaning we proceed from the photograph, and anything else we might add on is emanating from it. But the photographic is only the witnessing component.

Sayler: That’s exactly what I was going to say. What initially drew me to photography, and I know this sounds very hokey or new-agey, is when I feel at one with the world, studying the world and having to wait around because some condition isn’t what you want, or you’re moving around but just in a very minute way to make this incredible connection that you’re seeking possible.

Morris: We’re also endlessly fascinated with the ontology of the photograph. Let’s forget about AI and digital manipulation for a second. I still think that we have an orientation towards a photographic image that it is a moment in time that’s re-presented. It’s not represented, it’s re-presented. We talked about the future anterior before, this weird sense of time, this weirding or queering of time. I think photographs are a queer time. They disorient you, open your eyes, and get you to feel, because they have to rip something open. So if you take photographs in a way that forces viewers into really looking at them and really looking at them as photographs, viewers are already in a space where their perception of time is confused. And I think it’s a very productive confusion.