photo by: Richard Gwin

Amanda Macibua, the 2015-2016 printmaking artist-in-residence at the Lawrence Arts Center, stands in front of her print installation Put

When Lawrence Arts Center artist-in-residence Amanda Maciuba visited the Baker Wetlands for the first time last fall, she saw tire tracks etched into the dirt, evidence of a road being built, land that had been recently dug up in preservation efforts.

Several months later, the area is starting to resemble a wetland more and more, she says, albeit one created and managed by human forces.

“Now nature is coming in and filling it back in, which is beautiful, but it’s also like, only where we let it happen,” says Maciuba, who will wrap up her 12-month printmaking residency at the Arts Center by the end of July. “This is the boundary where preservation and nature can flourish. And here’s where we can build a road.”

“I don’t feel like I can speak on the controversy,” she admits, referring to her outsider status and the divisive construction of the South Lawrence Trafficway. “But I was really fascinated by the landscape that was left (over) from all this political controversy, man versus nature.”

The “Impermanent Lines” that seem to crisscross the Midwest, particularly northeast Kansas, are the subject of Maciuba’s exhibition of the same name now open through June 18 at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire St. The body of work created during her residency here is an exploration of our complicated relationship with the environment, and how human actions, alongside time and nature, have the power to alter both the landscape and human agency within that landscape.

photo by: Richard Gwin

Amanda Macibua's Fix

“I never saw them as they were. I just saw the restoration,” she says of the wetlands, which inspired her graphite drawing “Fix Something Else Nearby Instead.”

Maciuba experienced a similar phenomenon during her time as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, where the Buffalo, N.Y. native first fell in love with the Midwest. By the time she arrived in Iowa City, four years had already passed since the devastating 2008 flood that damaged nearly 800 homes and 260 businesses throughout the city limits and the encompassing county.

But the University of Iowa’s arts campus was still in recovery mode, and Maciuba, along with her fellow students and faculty, were forced to carry on in temporary classrooms while campus facilities were being rebuilt.

In Iowa, she found a landscape that was “very beautiful but also very manmade and regimented” due to commercialized farming.

“Being in the Midwest and being in this environment that has been regimented by humans so much brought this questioning of it forward in my work,” Maciuba says. “My work has always been a representation of where I’m living, because I create work about what I know.”

Maciuba’s travels to the Baker Wetlands, as well as the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and the Konza Prairie preserve in the Flint Hills, are the basis for much of “Impermanent Lines.”

Many of those lines can be seen in “Put Your Best Foot Forward and Two Steps Back,” a 47-foot-long installation comprising 242 rectangular prints stretched out along the gallery wall.

“A lot of the images in the prints are things we use as fences,” Maciuba explains, rattling off the historical consequences of the arrival of barbed wire and railroads on the Midwestern landscape, for example. “Things like construction fences and irrigation fences and how these pieces of equipment can physically change how water behaves on the landscape.”

And then there’s the prairie, too, with its long grasses and rich soil and roaming bison. “It can come back,” she says.

Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America, according to the National Park Service, before the vast majority of it was developed and plowed within a single generation. Today, less than 4 percent of that ecosystem remains, most of it in the nearby Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

The National Park Service uses the phrase “Here the tallgrass prairie takes its last stand” as a sort of tagline for the preserve, which Maciuba finds incredibly poignant.

photo by: Richard Gwin

Amanda Macibua's Put

“It’s the amazement of this beautiful landform that was here, but then when you think about it in the bigger picture, it’s also sad,” she says. “It’s a mourning of what was once there and also a celebration of what’s left.”

In “Impermanent Lines,” she raises some challenging questions: Why did it take us so long — in this case, until 1996, when the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was founded — to realize that these places are worth saving? And can preserving these small pockets of a once-vast environment landscape actually save these places for future generations? Is artificial preservation better than nothing at all?

Maciuba doesn’t have the answers, but she hopes her work will provoke thought in others. Overall, her show is a “positive” one, she says.

In the meantime, she’ll return to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve for a short residency — the park’s first for artists, she says — immediately after hers ends at the Lawrence Arts Center.

For Maciuba, whose work is inextricably tied to place, home is the Midwest now. She’d like to stay in the Kansas City area, hopefully with a teaching job to keep her here.

“Being in a place where you can see the results of what you’re doing, or where it’s not necessary that you know everyone but (more so) that I have this idea and I can see a way to make it happen — it’s like things are not insurmountable here,” she says. “You can make what you want to happen, happen.”