This FEELed Note is an interview with artist and scholar Dawn Roe about her recent show Super | Natural which partly emerged from our 2025 FEELers Summer Camp. The show includes a print-on-demand zine with a text response contributed by FEELed Lab Director, Astrida Neimanis. You can find a free digital version of the booklet here: https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/3193032
Super | Natural brings together works spanning almost five years of activity from the indefinitely ongoing series, DESCENT ≈ An Atlas of Relation, a collective archive of earth, plant, and animal forms living and dying together across both great and small distances.
Occupying the liminal space(s) of water-based worlds permanently re-shaped by extractive actions and colonial forms of “species management,” the many Beings gestating within and along these waters endure ongoing disruptions, forever altering how these spaces have and continue to function as home, and community.
Informed by ongoing engagement with filmic and photographic histories, select works in the exhibition are the result of ongoing investigations into camera-less methods offering new possibilities of representation for more-than-human voices. Multiple photosensitive materials and processes are deployed including direct animation of riparian vegetation on Super 8 film; derelict fishing gear (also known as ghost net) on X-ray negatives referencing emergent forms within the latent image; and digital still and moving image composites merging temporal and visual scales of fish and fish habitats.
Accompanying the exhibition is a print-on-demand zine with a text response very generously contributed by FEELed Lab Director, Astrida Neimanis.
Can you tell us more about the show?
Yes, this show emerged from several years of thinking and making of and with various waters surrounding, or running through, or alongside different spaces that I’ve known or have come to know as a temporary and transitory human occupant. I’ve never said it that way before, but that’s really the crux of it – grappling with my human form as an observer and participant of/with ecosystems that hold lives in so many ways.
About a decade ago, I realized it no longer felt quite right (for myself) to continue documenting or recording the world with a camera in ways that I had been – in a manner that just really wasn’t asking enough questions of this/these method(s) of image making. My imagery most often depicts Land and, even (or maybe especially?) when considered from a phenomenological perspective, the life within is not simply up for grabs – for the image making/taking.
So, I began finding ways to further slow myself down, in the hopes of opening myself up to learning and seeing more through prolonged encounters and sometimes camera-less modes of photography combined with other film and video recording methods.
Over time, the supernatural became more and more apparent. And that’s what this show is made up of – this type of attunement, and recognition.
How is the show connected to FEELers?
In so many ways! I mean, honestly, the energy I retained in my body from the time spent together during the FEELers camp absolutely fueled the production of the interconnected elements within the exhibition.
I just gave a short floor talk for the closing of the exhibition where I emphasized that I am never not thinking with others when I am making and responding, and this is absolutely true. I think this awareness is what led me to reach out to Astrida shortly after returning from camp to see if – perhaps, just maybe….might they be willing to contribute a piece of writing to the zine I intended to create as a component of the exhibition? The most generous yes came back to me and the gorgeously gut-wrenching essay, fish/scale, now lives forever alongside the imagery within the booklet.
The essay was read in full at the exhibition closing by myself along with six friends from a loose collective of feminist artists in Asheville. It felt quite special to perform this reading in a communal voice, where those in attendance could turn their attention toward listening (a deliberate nod to the Littoral Listening meetings where I first came to know of the FEELers).
What are you planning on doing with it next?
I’m planning to keep going! Hopefully, I’ll have opportunities to produce another iteration of the exhibition to be shown elsewhere, and I’ll keep folding in new works as they are created. I connect very much with how Ursula Le Guin describes art making/writing in the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction essay as
a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story…Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”
What I hope is to continue gathering seeds while being mesmerized by the stars – making connections with all the fellow human and more-than-human Beings I’ve yet to encounter, and to continue nurturing relationships already formed. Thank you, FEELers!
The FEELed lab 