“Of what surrounds me” Amanda Bradley, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Mette Tommerup. Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum

What Surrounds Me presents three artists whose creative process is profoundly influenced by nature, serving as both a significant element in their work and a conduit for exploring self and others. Taking its title from the poem by Mary Oliver (1935–2019) of the same name, this exhibition positions each artist as the instigator of close contemplation. Looking at their surroundings, Amanda Bradley, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Mette Tommerup think of the natural world as both an immersive state and a vehicle for making meaning.

In Amanda Bradley’s work, themes of identity and belonging manifest through environmental imagery. While creating, Bradley considers what is invisible, ephemeral, and hard to quantify. Heavily influenced by writing, Bradley incorporates embossed lettering as a way to complicate the legibility of both the final image and the superimposed text. While not a documentary, her photography documents lushness, abundance, and density, with her home country of Belize as a common subject.

Abundant flora and complex terrain inform Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s practice, which includes sculpture, painting, and mixed media work. Born and raised in Miami, Rodriguez has an intimate familiarity with the region’s vibrant vegetation as well as the light, humidity, and ferocity of this environment. While Rodriguez’s work is often maximalist, it is not rooted in living nature so much as the passage of time, the changing of the seasons, the process of decay, and the nature of resiliency. Rodriguez’s work for the exhibition will include a rarely seen, monumental installation titled Endless Autumn, from the collection of the Perez Art Museum as well as a new, large-scale painting.

Mette Tommerup’s practice, which includes public art projects, reflects the artist’s longstanding inquiry into nature. A native of Denmark, Tommerup grew up near the ocean. Her large-scale paintings, which often include a performative component, evoke underwater seascapes, grassy expanses, and complex topographies. Tommerup considers her physical self and the viewer’s physical response as integral to her work. Rooted in languages of abstraction and the intersection of painting and sculpture, Tommerup’s monumental installations encompass the viewer, evoking a sense of awe. Deeply inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver, Tommerup will premiere a new installation created for Of What Surrounds Me.

Amanda Bradley (b. 1994), I sit as a passenger (on this road), 2023. Black and white photographic diptych. Courtesy of the artist.