Local artist Brianna Harrington spends a lot of time outdoors as an avid hiker, wellness coach, and master gardener, connecting to the earth and listening to the ground beneath her feet.

Brianna’s new series, “Soil Song: Exploring the Decaying Vibrancy of the World’s Soil,” now on display at White Bear Center for the Arts, uses paintings that incorporate soil and natural elements from places in Minnesota and beyond to explore the impact our environment has on our health and well-being.

The works, hung in White Bear Center for the Arts’ Community Hallway, are watercolor paintings with pigments of pink and green shining through the sand. As a watercolor artist and teacher at WBCA, much of Brianna’s work focuses on the landscape and the natural world. “I’ve always been interested in trying to take better care of people and the planet,” she says. So as she continued on her artistic journey, she found herself naturally drawn to gathering pebbles to use in her paintings, and, after testing the soil of her garden, reading studies that said soil makes sounds when it’s healthy.

What is this connection between soil and sound? Ecoacoustics, which studies an ecosystem’s soundscape, offers insight into soil health. Think of it as a garden party: healthy soil features rich soundscapes made by insects and microbes moving through the soil. The sounds are much quieter in degraded soils which lack life forms essential for soil productivity and ecosystem balance.

In her artist statement, Brianna argues that this balance contributes to the human health cycle by impacting the nutrients in our food supply and influencing our immunity and gut health. Unfortunately, soil health is declining due in part to human impact.

Her goal is to get people to care. “The beautiful thing is recognizing that our environments really impact us,” she says. When people realize how their environment affects them, they’re more willing to interact with it more intentionally.

So, Brianna visited places like Crosby Farm Regional Park in St. Paul, and Nokomis Beach, areas with a lot of activity and things that are natural and unnatural. She moved through the space with curiosity, first taking a long hike or meditating. Then gathered small samples, took pictures of rocks, and identified a color palette. In her studio, the curiosity continued. She asked herself, “What do these materials want to become? How do they want to be used?” Slowly, they became microcosms of the places they were sourced from, portraits of the natural world around us.

While the project brings attention to environmental advocacy and the cycle of human impact on the environment, Brianna says she has no agenda. It doesn’t require too much contemplation; it’s just the thought of what’s happening in the earth beneath us.

Brianna compares this sensation to home design, research shows that having color and art in a home gives people a hit of dopamine. “The same is true of our natural world,” she says. Green spaces with flowers or trees help people regulate their breathing and lower blood pressure, it can even lead to less crime.

In the next year, Brianna hopes to continue the “Soil Song” series by recording the soil to see how the land has changed over time. “I’m excited to see how this idea evolves and take people on the journey of being curious about our world with me.”

You can see “Soil Song” in WBCA’s Community Hallway on view until January 6, 2025, as part of a series highlighting the artistry of WBCA’s teaching artists.