Natural/Unnatural
featuring artwork by Emily Clare and Kelsey Merreck Wagner
Truist Gallery| April 17 - June 21, 2026
This exhibition encourages viewers to reflect on their own relationships to nature and the environment and consider the ways in which humans, animals, plants, and landscapes are all interconnected. What is our responsibility to care for all the beings that can’t speak? How do we use our voices creatively, whether through visual art, performance, literary art or any medium to advocate for solidarity and coexistence? The exhibition represents the myriad of ways our actions impact the planet and reminds us to engage in stewardship, lean into empathy, and envision community-building as means of imagining more socially and environmentally just futures.
Natural/Unnatural brings together the work of two Winston-Salem-based artists: textile artist Kelsey Merreck Wagner and printmaker Emily Clare. Working across different mediums, both artists grapple with the realities of increasingly precarious landscapes and ecological catastrophes through their creative practices. The exhibition features a mix of individual work by each artist, as well as collaborative projects blending weaving and printmaking processes. Collectively, this exhibition explores how both artists make sense of threatened ecosystems, and their creative practices offer an artistic critique of humanity’s impacts on natural environments.
About the artists
Emily Clare creates works on paper that respond to the fragility of our environment and the crucial relationships we have with botanical life. Starting by collecting native, invasive and exotic plants found during explorations in the landscape. She prints parts of plants to capture their shape and textures using color to create a portrait of a region remarking on a changing and fragile environment by weaving prints together. Invasive plants seem to weave their way through our natural landscape having lasting effects on the ecosystem, and local wildlife.
Kelsey Merreck Wagner creates weavings made from recycled materials that she collects from community contributions and trash cleanups; incorporating plastic bags, wires, old clothes, housewares, and holiday decorations into the weft of her textiles. The layers of color and texture give her work a stratigraphic quality that examines the extent of capitalist behaviors on environments through post-consumer waste.
Exhibition Location
120 Morris Street, Durham NC
*Inside the Durham Arts Council, first floor