Complete Earth Day with artist Susie Ganch in her art installation Under Land Over Sky.

Cloud cakes will be served during an informal artist talk.

Susie Ganch’s art installation invites collaborators and viewers to viscerally experience the overwhelming scale of plastic pollution and its relationship to climate change. Ganch works with excess material - the abject waste of human consumption - that has not (yet) found its way back to a functional afterlife. Her human-scale form of recycling has woven coffee cup lids into swirling tapestries, plastic bags into cloud rooms, and now water bottles into architecture. In Under Land Over Sky, seven elevations of green emerge through 6,680 translucent plastic bottles activated by daylight from unshuttered gallery windows. Together, the varying colors of the bottles create a 24-foot topographical map of Sweet Briar College and the Shenandoah Mountains to the west.

Ganch’s work responds to and comments on our ongoing interaction with the landscape and environment. Drawing on her background in geology and metalsmithing, her practice-led research relies on discoveries that can only be made by working with materials and finding solutions through hands-on experiments. Ganch’s studio practice centers beauty, references science, is influenced by culture, and uses criticism to address the environmental urgencies of our times.