an interview with Leah Graeff

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In February of 2025, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, LA and spend time in their special exhibition, Prairie Stories: Art and Ecological Restoration on Louisiana’s Prairies. As an ecological writer, I was drawn to the way these visual artists grappled with the same topics and landscapes that I attempt to render in words. I was amazed at the textures, the stories, the wide variety of materials and perspectives. I found myself drawn to so many of the pieces, including Ashlee Wilson and Leah Graeff. Graeff’s work grappled with poetic surprise, drawing inspiration from poetry. I spoke with her about the poetic process of her visual art.

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Rêverie for me is imagination.
It’s hope, thoughtful wandering. 
Endless pathways.

Stacey Balkun: Leah, thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your art! Tell us a little about yourself: what forms do you practice? What subjects are your current obsessions?

 

Leah Graeff: Stacey, it's my pleasure, thank you for taking an interest in my work. I was born and raised in Sunset, Louisiana, a small farming town in the prairies of St. Landry Parish, famously known for its sweet potatoes. While I didn’t grow up in a farming family, I did grow up connected to the land and the prairie that surrounded me. My father was a working artist and musician and immersed me in both of those worlds from an early age. I am currently living in Lafayette, Louisiana, and working as a Talented Visual Arts teacher in the Lafayette Parish School system. I primarily work in photography, installation, and songwriting. Lots of things pique my curiosity, and in each I like to explore the environment/figure/viewer relationship. It’s a constant curiosity in all of my work. Right now, I’m very interested in the decorative exterior shutters on houses built in our rural parishes around the 1940s.

 

Tell us about the subject matter for the “Rêverie” series. What is the Cajun Prairie, and what does it mean to you?

The Cajun prairie is the land we live on in Southwest Louisiana. Although it’s coined the “Cajun Prairie”, it has sustained the ancestors of so many people as traditions of the Attakapa (Ishak) people, Nova Scotia, Africa, Spain, Germany, and the Caribbean were established. But just as our diverse region is blanketed as “Cajun”, so is the prairie. The Rêverie series stemmed from the research I was doing at the Ecology Center (one of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s research facilities), for my 2014 installation Biophilia. Part of their work is maintaining nearly 30 acres of prairie restoration developed and used as an educational tool on the benefits of the prairie to our ecosystem and to farmland. While I was doing my research, I was invited to observe and photograph a restorative burn. It was a complete sensory experience. I kept coming back for more burns. The images from this series were taken over a few years.

There’s something dreamlike about the image appearing
from white paper in a developing tray.
It requires my full attention, and... 
I wanted [that] with digital photography.

The images are so powerful; I can see why you kept going back. You chose to compose this series with ink transfers on wood. How do you source your materials, and what does reclamation add to the final piece?

The concept of reclamation for these pieces is more in the process than in the materials. I started experimenting with transfers while working with digital color photography. I wasn’t connecting with it as much as I was with darkroom processes. There’s something dreamlike about the image appearing from white paper in a developing tray. It requires my full attention, and I realized it was the time and effort it took to make prints in the darkroom that I wanted with digital photography.

I experimented with different materials from types of paper and printers, mediums, new wood versus reclaimed wood, to how I dissolved the paper from the ink. Through that experimentation I found that the best way for me to make the most intentional pieces that gave room for the unexpected was to use high quality digital prints on sanded plywood. From there I am able to reclaim that darkroom print making process of revealing the image slowly through time and effort.

I want the images to have a painterly feel, and a little nod to the romantic, so I add medium over the entire surface to give a brushstroke effect. The entire piece becomes a visualization of how I feel when I experience the prairie burning literally and figuratively into memory.

 

That’s incredible! These pieces are so textured, and textured even more by the poetry addition. As a poet, I often turn to paintings for inspiration. I’ve never made a painting after a poem, though! This series includes the text of Emily Dickinson’s poem “To Make a Prairie.” Tell us more about that: how does poetry inspire you as an artist?

Poetry has always been accessible for me because of my struggle to be still for too long, and the short form of poetry is digestible. Or maybe it's that the words can be composed to make a more interesting shape than a rectangle. Either way, it’s always been an influence on my work.

Poetry makes its way into my work in different ways. Sometimes a poem will directly influence a piece, or I'll be researching for a piece and find a poem that helps me to better understand my own point of view on the subject. I’ve also connected to a poem after I’ve made a piece and included it in the title.

 

 

Can you describe the artistic process of rendering words into something visual? Is ekphrasis a common practice for you, or is there something special about this Emily Dickinson piece?

I find Emily Dickinson’s poetry extremely visual. She uses imagery so well, and even the pages she wrote on were visually interesting in the way she formatted her writing, to little notes and ink blots left on the page. I’ve made reference to that in some of my darkroom work with fingerprints and settled chemistry along the edges of print. Being a songwriter as well, I work with ekphrasis across my own work. My installation Biophilia was a collaboration between friends and artists to create an installation that also featured a musical performance of songs written in response to the installation.

 

Besides the connection to the Dickinson poem, why “revery/rêverie?” How do you personally define this word? What does it evoke for you? I’ll also add: how do poetry and the landscape intersect with other entities, like ecology and culture?

Rêverie for me is imagination. It’s hope, thoughtful wandering. It roots me to the past, grounds me in the present, and helps me reach for what’s ahead. I see these entities all intersecting as conduits of connection. As endless pathways.

 

Oh, I love that. We need to be thinking about what’s ahead as much as where we came from. We need to be mindful of interconnectedness, of the multitudes of pathways forward and across. Thank you again for talking with us. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you so much for presenting me with such thoughtful questions. I really enjoyed spending time with them and forming my responses. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about prairie restoration to follow The Ecology Center, and The Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society.

 

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Leah Graeff is a visual and performing artist and teacher living and working in photography, ceramics, and installation. Her work explores figure/viewer,environment/figure, and viewer/environment relationships, which forms a connection between the viewer and the artist.

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the New South Writing Contest, her creative and critical work has appeared in Attached to the Living World, Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, and several other anthologies and journals. Stacey holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where she was awarded the Holdich Scholar Award, and an MFA in Poetry from Fresno State. She has been granted fellowships and grants from the Modern Language Association, PEN America, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others, in support of her writing. Stacey teaches online at The Poetry Barn and the University of New Orleans.