Specimens of Light

Artist/Instructor: Esther Neisen

Supplies included

*Participants, feel free to bring old photo negatives to cut up

Register Here

Collage with repurposed film. This unique material is what artist Esther Neisen uses to create her insect-based work. Her lightbox artwork is in the Burchfield Penney permanent collection and is currently on exhibit in A Vast, Tiny World: Burchfield's Insects & Spiders exhibition. Participants will work with reclaimed film-related materials to explore transparency and modify existing imagery. Through a process of careful selection and composition (and lots of cutting!) each participant will create a unique, insect-inspired framed artwork to take home. Participants can use a template provided by the artist or design your own unique insect.

Esther Neisen 

Throughout her life, Esther Neisen has been captivated by the natural world and the "intricacies and variety of both interior and exterior structures." Neisen is an accomplished illustrator and craft artist who works in a wide variety of media. She has lived in Western New York since 2002. Neisen's current body of work focuses on anatomically accurate representations of insects created from reclaimed film, photographic negatives, and the occasional found material. Her creative process for these works is slow and detailed, and "allows [for] a great deal of immediate problem solving, which keeps me both happy and engaged." Her broad range of technical and creative skills all play a role in the creation process. "I first create a pencil drawing, which is broken down into a schematic. I carefully choose the film selections by color and content to best express the subject in both a representative and slightly illustrative manner while still working within the strict confines of their anatomy." "The insects are carefully chosen for their behavior or the mythology of their behavior to relate directly to human behavioral properties. Working with the people that surround me, using what information they are willing to offer in context for research, I have in the past few years used this method to express interpersonal familial relations, social anxieties, and aggressions.

For further information, please contact Kathy Shiroki: shirokkg@buffalostate.edu