"Come Outside" aims to showcase the dichotomy of the natural and built environements around us. Through this exploration, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the ways these spaces intersect, coexist, and sometimes clash. By examining our relationship with both, we can uncover new perspectives on how we shape and are shaped by our environment.
Featurng work by:
Lisa Jordan
Danielle Morgan
Hanna Norris
Brian Nolan
Jennifer Dunn
Maggie Chen
Oepening:
Thursday, July 3rd
5pm-9pm
Make.Shift Art Space
306 flora st
98225
Maggie Chen
These past few years, I have been reflecting on my relationship with land and the natural world. How does it take care of me? What gifts has the land given me? How do I find my role in caring for this earth in return? Big questions with big implications for all of us! I am still working to answer these questions with guidance from those who have wisdom on this existential topic: Robin Wall Kimmerer, POOR Magazine poverty skolas, mycelium, indigenous basket weavers, bicycle enthusiasts, and all my friends who lovingly tend to the earth.
Making things with sticks and other bits I find outside is a way for me to joyfully interact with the natural world. I work with natural materials using only my hands (and feet) and tools such as knives, needles, and scissors. Each stick is its own inspiration. Making this work has also led me to the world of craft, although I have only just skimmed the surface.
Textile weaving, basketry, woodworking. So many groups of humans throughout history have developed their own methods, tools, aesthetics, and spiritual meanings around these crafts, and I'm looking forward to learning more. To make something well is to give respect to the material, and things that are well-made bring us joy. And to know the skills and labor needed to make something cultivates gratitude. This kind of joy and gratitude is a paradigm-shifting force!
Danielle Morgan-Scharhon
Look up 1-31
The practice of painting and drawing grounds me in the tangible and natural world and provides a much needed break from my film/video work. I find that being able to create something and hold it in my hands is a meditating and rejuvenating experience, free of screens and with different constraints and challenges than that of the time-based media of film, video and theater.
Focusing on just one image in solitude allows me the freedom to let go of expectations, forcing me to accept and work with what is happening in the moment. It challenges me to release the ideas of perfection and striving for a predetermined outcome.
For this series I gave myself the prompt to “Look Up” and reflect on the qualities of the Pacific Northwest sky using watercolor, black ink and just one small piece of watercolor paper each day for the month of March 2024. The result feels like a mini hyper-local weather report of 31 tiny pieces.
Jennifer Dunn
My work explores the relationship between vibrant life and botanical necrosis as a continuum. With influences from nature and disrupted realism, a new vision is distilled from both traditional and modern narratives. Everything becomes corroded into a manifesto of rot, and is reborn anew, leaving only a sense of the inevitability of a new order... or something like that.
It's not that serious, I just like an excuse to paint creepy stuff while I learn to paint over and over again.
Returning
Acrylic on canvas
2025
$500
Lich King / Lichen Queen
Acrylic on canvas
2025
$350
Bone Study I
Acrylic on canvas
2025
$150
Bone Study II
Acrylic on canvas
2025
$150
Just Visiting
Acrylic on canvas
2025
$500
Hanna Norris
As a Bellingham-based artist and designer, I blend nature, illustration and folk art influences into my work. My pieces explore the clash between our desire to connect with nature and the bombardment of modern intrusions — whether sound pollution, other humans treading disrespectfully, or even the laws preventing our access. Using acrylic on wood panels, I hope my pieces invite reflection on our complex relationship with nature and our role in preserving it.
Your Land
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2025
$450
Such Silence!
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2025
$450
I Come Into the Peace of Wild Things
Acrylic on Wood Panel
2025
$450
Brian Nolan
Brian Nolan was originally from Chicago, where he graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Education. He started his teaching career in South Korea where he continued to create and show his work in galleries and even the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. As part of a foreign artist exhibition. Brian moved to Bellingham in 2018 where he has shown his work around local cafes and markets. His work uses all different paint mediums and surfaces including his handmade recycled paper.
My work explores quiet, half-abandoned interior spaces that are based on memories of how a place felt more than its exact layout. Into these rooms, I introduce loose, abstract forms that often take on the feeling of figures or creatures—part emotion, part memory. They seem to move through space, sometimes quietly, sometimes with tension.
I’m interested in the balance between structure and chaos, stillness and energy. Each painting is a way of exploring how I remember a time and place. Half way through struggling to make a rigid structure I embrace pure abstraction and allow paint to run and splatter and drip. Like a Rorschach test I find the figures and creatures within the abstract shapes, letting them emerge as if they were always there, waiting to be seen.
These imagined interiors are often shaped by a longing to be elsewhere—closer to nature, to something more open, wild, and alive. The rooms may be closed in, but the creatures inside them seem to reach for escape, for breath, for a sense of the outside world. In this way, my paintings become layered spaces: part room, part memory, part dream of being somewhere freer. They hold both the comfort and unease of places half-remembered, and the restless desire to return to something more instinctive and alive.
Bottom Step Exercise
Acrylic on handmade paper
June 2025
$500
Scrutiny
Acrylic on handmade paper
June 2025
$500
Encryption
Acrylic on handmade paper
May 2025
$500