©DM Witman, Ecologies of Mourning , No.1

Today we share a conversation between Maarten Schilt, co-founder of Schilt Publishing & Gallery (Amsterdam)and visual artist and educator, DM Witman in anticipation and celebration of the exhibition, Ecologies of Mourning, Ecologies of Restorationat Schilt Publishing & Gallery, Amsterdam. The official opening is Sunday September 21st, 2025 from 5-7 pm.

DM Witman is a transdisciplinary artist navigating the polycrisis employing photographic materials, video, and installation. Her practice investigates climate disruption–at the intersection of presence/absence, resiliency, and ecology–relying on both archival impulses and ephemerality. Her creative practice is an act of bearing witness, memorial, and synthesizing that which is existentially urgent–at once both a lament for what has been lost, and a call to action to cultivate care and resilience as stewards for what remains.

Her work has appeared in more than 120 solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has been selected for artist-residencies such as Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Maine; Monson Arts, Maine; How to Flatten A Mountain, Ireland.

Witman’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, CICA Museum, Korea, and is placed within many private collections. She is affiliated with photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM and Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, Portland, Maine. Interviews and publications include Inside Climate News, The Guardian, BBC Culture, and WIRED. Her work has been recognized with grants from the Maine Arts Commission, The Kindling Fund and Warhol Foundation, The John Anson Kittredge Fund, and the Puffin Foundation.

Witman received her MFA from Maine Media College, and she holds a BS in Environmental Science from Kutztown University. She splits her time between the Borderlands of South Texas and Midcoast Maine. She is currently Assistant Professor of Photography and Graduate Program Chair at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Instagram: @dm_witman

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Mourning , No.2

Ecologies of Mourning is a deeply personal exploration of loss and mourning. Expressed with salt, silver, handmade papers, and metal threads—of process and transition.  A lifetime of query has yielded that neither grief, nor healing are linear in nature and often intermingle in a liminal space. These are meditation of loss and presence | absence.

I made the paper more than ten years ago and have held onto it like the grief I have accumulated along the way. By engaging with the materials to process my internal space, I have understood that ecological distress stems not from hopelessness, but of existential concerns for humanity and more-than-human species. In these works, salt serves as a substrate and metaphor for mourning, for healing, and the cycles of life and death.

Ecologies of Restoration is an investigation and counter to this loss and mourning, which has been so pervasive across the globe. I have engaged with various salts in several of its forms, colors, and chemical compositions. These are visual meditations created with hand-cultured salt crystals. Salt is an essential compound needed by humans to live, and yet too much can be fatal. Salt is ubiquitous. Historically, humans have employed salt in many ways—curing foods, medicine, baptism, embalming, warding off evil spirits, healing rituals, and as currency. Salt has a physical presence and, in forming various crystalline structures, provides a new metaphor for regeneration and resiliency, an essential facet to the climate predicament if humanity is to survive.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Mourning , No.18

Maarten Schilt: As preparation for this interview for Lenscratch as well as for your upcoming solo show in our Amsterdam gallery (combined with another solo show of Brenton Hamilton, your always kind and masterly comrade in arms), I have, of course, been reading again about your Ecologies work, your artist statements and also your most impressive CV. (I have seldom seen an artist CV so in-depth, long without the commonly and unnecessary flatteries, imaginative in what you’ve all been doing and do, and last but not least: important!)

Which brings me immediately to my first question: What makes an environmental scientist decide to become a visual artist dealing with the subjects she has been confronted with as a scientist?

DM Witman: It wasn’t so much a decision as a necessity, an existential necessity. Making is a way to process experience, to communicate and share with others. As a scientist, it is about observation, synthesizing and reporting. There isn’t much room for expression of the experience. I worked as an environmental scientist for fifteen years before leaving to pursue making and teaching full-time. In my work as an environmental scientist, there were times, when I would go to some of the most beautiful places that seemed as if they were untouched. To know that in a few months, or a year, that whatever the place was when I was there to observe and report on, that it would be changed or destroyed – this picked at me over time, leading to a personal deficit.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Mourning , No.25

MS: You write about your Ecologies of Mourning that it is a deeply personal exploration of loss and grief. Is the loss and grief a personal feeling or is it loss and grief for the Earth or, better, for current live on Earth, for it seems in the end to be disappearing?

DM: It is all of that. My understanding of the world, my entire world view has been through the natural world; the changes that we see, that we witness, that we experience – not only for what has happened, but what is coming – for the more-than-human species, for humanity, for the earth and all that it has been. Earth will survive in some way, but it is a matter of who and what will survive.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Mourning , No.37

MS: Were you aware of the loss and grief when you made the paper ten years before using it for this series? Or did it become in your eyes better and better to serve this purpose? I ask this for I guess that “normally” when an artist produces his own paper, he knows what it’s going to be for, right? Did you know unconsciously too you think, and just waited for the right moment? Or is it more simple or accidental than that?

DM: I had been aware that what I was witnessing, the degradation of the environment, of the systems and the balance that has become out of kilter. But in the beginning, when I was working as a scientist, I didn’t understand it quite yet as grief. I understood that I was impacted on a deeper level than I even understood at the time. The paper making was a purely instinctual undertaking. I had never made paper before, and I haven’t since. I was making it at my first artist residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop, NY. I really was there with the intent of working in their darkroom, but I fell in love with making paper. There was such a physicality to it, similar to my working in the darkroom. I had no idea what I would make with it (the paper), but somehow it felt important and necessary in those weeks of making. There were many times that I would get into a cleaning mode in my studio and almost throw it away to make room. But each time, something held me back, and I had this sense that the right work would come along for this box of abaca paper that I made.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Restoration , No.12

MS: What is the exact role of salt in all this? You write that it “serves as a substrate and metaphor for mourning, for healing, and the cycles of life and death”. Can you elaborate on that please? I have a “pedestrian mind”, as a former author of mine used to say about himself. So for me salt is mainly, well… salt.

I think that I do understand what you mean though, but I feel I must be sure. Otherwise you might fly away out of my sight. I need to get a grip on the technical skills you have while making paper, let alone what you then put on it. And I need to know as a spectator – and as a gallerist! – what it is what I see and why it does to me so intensely what it does to me.

DM: Salt is everywhere; it is ubiquitous. There are thousands of compounds categorized as salt and include substances such as table salt, Borax, and Epsom salts, common everyday substances that we use in one way or other. Salt is necessary for our living – it is one part of the many aspects that sustain our human lives. And of course, too much salt can be harmful, within our bodies, or even in the phenomena of “ghost forests”, when entire ecosystems begin to collapse, resulting from salt-water intrusion.

In this work, employing the process of salted-paper, invented by W.H. Fox Talbot, it circles back to the earliest of days in photography, before “photography” was even in the lexicon. I love working with the process, for it is a seemingly straightforward process (but filled with every kind of variable there could be). Salted-paper has a gorgeous tonal range and it can be worked to achieve a variety of aesthetic possibilities. In this process, silver nitrate, when paired with a salted surface yields the light sensitive silver chloride, a salt.

Each piece is exposed to UV light, processed in a light salt bath, toned with gold, and then fixed. They are washed in water to complete the archival processing.

These are manifestations, contemplations of change, of loss, and ultimately of death with spheres and tones which push forward or recede into the very paper. These require time to unfold in front of the viewer. Many of these works from Ecologies of Mourning do not reveal themselves quickly.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Restoration , No.13

MS: Let’s move to your “counter-series” Ecologies of Restoration. A series which, in my words, more or less brings the viewer back on his feet after the extreme and intense beauty but also Nietzchean darkness and deepness of the Ecologies of Mourning.

Suddenly it’s figurative, colorful, beautiful again of course, but also joyful and bright. It belongs very much to the dark work its stems from, but you didn’t make it for nothing. You just had to do it I presume?

DM: Yes, these two series manifested concurrently–it was exciting for me to be able to move between the different processes, engaging with my concerns but in varying methods. Working on these at the same time provided me with a necessary balance.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Restoration , No.14

MS: Ah, so you didn’t do them after each other, you switched from one to the other, back and forth! How interesting, for it provides an even closer and for me, more natural connection between the two series. Did you need the counter-issue as well? Or did you do it for us, the viewers?

DM: That is an excellent question. The two series are yin and yang, a balance between hope and loss, of disintegration and resilience. I have spent so much time working in the realm of grief and mourning, that I desperately wanted to be able to explore the space of healing and hope, even if for an instant. And yes, I suppose it was as much for others as for myself, and maybe more so.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Restoration , No.23

MS: And what is it for you that we see in your figures, colors and joy? And why?

DM: For me, as I can only speak for what I see, these works in Ecololiges of Restoration are a macro/micro view of life, of the cosmos, a building and origins of life, an ontology. The color bursts can feel like a stained-glass window, filled with luminous color, sharing a story, not unlike that of a stained-glass window in a chapel. In both series, there is a bit of a spiritual ecology.

©DM Witman, Ecologies of Restoration , No.25

MS: And last but not least: What is the role of salt again in this turnaround restoration world? (I always loved salt, in its many aspects, eating it, getting into my skin when swimming in the sea, the cleansing it causes, also mentally… But you’re adding a whole new layer to my beloved salt! Thank you!)

DM: The pieces in Ecologies of Restoration begin with a simple salt solution which I grow on a pane of glass. The salt grows of its own properties, generating crystalline structures, maneuvering about on the glass. I appreciate that here in this process I am simply an instigator in the unfolding of the process.

MS: I love this pure explanatory answer, for it’s the scientist in you speaking again. The crystal circle is round!