Ellie Irons
Artist
environmentalperformanceagency.com
Ellie Irons is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York. Working across media, from watercolor to re-wilding experiments, her practice combines socially engaged art and ecology fieldwork. Recent work involves collaborations focused on spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), including co-founding the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. Irons received a BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and an MFA from Hunter College, NY. She is currently a PhD candidate in arts practice Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focusing on how critical ecosocial art contributes to the struggle for multispecies solidarity in an age of climate chaos and mass extinction.
Her work has been part of recent exhibitions on environmental art and activism, including The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREArt, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and Unsettled Nature: Artists Reflect on the Age of Humans at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant. Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, an artist and Public Programs Coordinator at the Queens Museum, andrea haenggi, an artist/choreographer and faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Ellie Irons, an artist and PhD Candidate at RPI, Christopher Kennedy, an artist and Assistant Director at the Urban Systems Lab at the New School University, and spontaneous urban plants.