Reusch’s sculptural installations are a physical expansion of the border between “society” and “nature.” Born out of a desire to expand the space in which viewers experience a piece, the space where delineation and meaning making takes place, so they may go inside it—become closer to its nature and their own, touch and be touched—for a desire of true and intentional meaning making, Viewing oneself as separate from wilderness, as separate from the collective, as separate from a painting is just the notion, really violence, being resisted in these pieces. 

 

In her Thesis series at Lewis & Clark College, Get Inside Me (2014-2015), Reusch created large scale pods of light and air meant to capture, pause, and elongate the space of a painting enough that viewers might go inside of it.  The welded frames of the installations fall into the background as large pods of light-catching plastic surround viewers.  The pods, tediously made of layer after layer of packing tape, have caught strands of Reusch’s hair, fingerprints, dirt and dust, and layered out into giant swaying breathing sheets splitting and multiplying the viewing and moving space. The delineation between plastic and skin, abstract and realist, waste and reuse, viewer and piece, bodies and societal constructions of bodies, is expanded out until lost in a swaying film of organic inorganics—light through plastic painting the air, walls, and viewers.  

 

Meditating on this further, When a Flower Presses a Finger (2019) was another academic-based study of expanding boundaries created by societal constructions of nature as “other,” and the dangers posed there. For one to see nature as separate from self collective is a construction of whiteness and white supremacy and is used to create a disconnect wherein societal inequities, environmental racism and destruction of the earth is possible. To push back against this, to champion the soft, to search for gentle healing meaning, Reusch went through a series of ceramic sculptural installations and academic writings exploring the space between plants and hands.  Reusch spent months and months creating hundreds of small sculptures of hands, petals, fingers, leaves, leaf-hands, and petal-fingers—abstractions of the two combined. Looking for, expanding out and living in, the space where hand ends and plant begins, where fingertips end and petals begin, where holding a plant becomes a plant holding you.  The sculptures went through many variations and installations, fermentations of touching and being touched, until finally installed suspended and expanded out from grounded piles on a steel frame. Reusch states that the most successful sculpture of the meditative collection were the ceramic petals, which were created simply by pressing her first two fingers together with her thumb over clay resulting in a small petal shaped object. one press. Punctuated with hands-on experience in her ongoing career as a backcountry wilderness guide, Reusch’s practice and pieces stem-out-from and rely-on her outdoor work with youth to break down the boundaries between “wilderness” and “society”, “self” and “collective,” “hands” and “plants.”  These harmful constructed boundaries, binaries, and separations are, again pressed down to the thinnest films and therefore expanded out into deconstructed, decolonized, liveable spaces where unlearning and healing and true meaning making and understanding can take place.