Leah Raintree: Legible Earth: The Fire Tapestries
Piedmont Arts, Martinsville, VA
October 25, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Legible Earth: The Fire Tapestries marks the 10th anniversary of the Valley Fire in Northern California, when Raintree’s sister and family lost their home to wildfire. Borrowing from the language of ancient tapestries that survive as storytellers, intricate line drawings are interwoven with washes of wildfire char. These intimate explorations address the global impacts of wildfire on ecological and human communities, alongside the process of bearing witness, renewal, and repair.
The exhibition is a continuation of Raintree’s series Legible Earth, which explores the artifacts and inscriptions of climate change. Legible Earth: Script and Score engage the collection at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Core Repository, producing artworks using deep ocean sediments from the Arctic and Antarctic regions, used by scientists in the study of ice sheet loss.
In these multi-layered works, Raintree responds to these earthen materials through an improvisational drawing process, recalling maps, musical scores, and other systems of notation.
Also on view is a large-scale ink on crushed paper drawing from Raintree’s ongoing Timekeeper series, which underscores the importance of process, time, and active attention across her artistic practice.
This project was supported by various scientific and cultural institutions. Raintree wishes to thank her sister and family, who collected wildfire char for use in this project, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Lower East Side Printshop and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.
