Exhibition brings together four women artists working with natural materials, natural processes, and the transformative power of nature
MoCA L.I. presents Earth Mothers, on view July 18 through September 20, 2026. The exhibition brings together four women artists whose work is created with natural materials or through natural processes, and who are united by an awareness of nature’s transformative power.
Featured artists include Christie Jones, Rainy Lehrman, Becca Osborn, and Lorena Salcedo-Watson. Through painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and material-based processes, the artists in Earth Mothers consider the planet and the life it sustains as an integrated whole: a network of birth, transformation, death, and rebirth.
Christie Jones is an eco-artist who collaborates with the coastal environment. Working with handmade paints derived from earth and mineral pigments applied to thick rag paper, Jones creates work by submerging materials in salt water, pulling them onto the shoreline, and allowing sand, salt, handmade pigments, and sunlight to interact. Through this ritualistic process, she creates meditative spaces that draw viewers in through surface and material beauty while quietly holding urgent environmental concerns.
Rainy Lehrman employs traditional craft techniques to create fluid forms embedded with cautionary foreshadowing, dual meaning, and ancient wisdom. By steaming and bending alder and maple wood, Lehrman explores the mythic relationship between snakes and the divine feminine. As creatures of the Earth who periodically regenerate their skin, snakes have long been associated with agriculture, fecundity, fertility, and transformation.
Becca Osborn creates ceramic sculptures of intricate texture and organic form to explore grief and loss, which she represents through the metaphor of a bog. Bogs, mires, and swamps are often viewed as places of danger, yet they teem with life and fertility as they straddle the space between land and water. Osborn sees grief as something that allows us to become more fully human, more fully integrated, and more connected with each other and the planet.
Lorena Salcedo-Watson often employs organic pigments and oils in her large-scale drawings inspired by botany, entomology, and human anatomy. Her work frequently depicts organic life emerging from, or returning to, its place in the Earth. Through personal experience, observation, and imagination, Salcedo-Watson sees life as merging through time and space as a unified network of connections revealing growth and transformation.
Together, the artists in Earth Mothers offer a deeply layered meditation on material, memory, ecology, and renewal.
The public is invited to attend the opening reception on Saturday, July 18, 2026 at 5:00 PM. All are welcome.
Coffee with a Curator
Saturday, August 29, 2026 | 12:00 PM
MoCA L.I., 20 Terry Street, Patchogue
