Observing Place

Observing Place
~Art, Culture, and Ways of Looking~

Understanding culture often begins not with explanation, but with attention. Before language, before theory, there is place: the physical environment in which daily life unfolds, shaping habits, values, and ways of seeing. My relationship to culture—both as an artist and as a sojourner—has grown primarily through my travels and deep engagement rather than through formal academic frameworks.

Writing, drawing, and sculpture each ask for a slightly different way of observing the world. Gradually I came to understand that these different forms of attention—composition, visual mapping, and working with form in space—can also become ways of learning how culture lives within place.

Early on, while raising my three children, I was drawn to the Montessori method. What appealed to me was not its structure, but its emphasis on curiosity, patience, and learning through direct engagement with the environment. Observation was understood as an active process rather than a passive one. That orientation stayed with me and quietly informed the way I later approached all my own work.

Over the course of time, I worked and volunteered in a range of settings, from nature journaling programs in California to collaborative projects with the Belize Audubon Society and in Kenya drawing with the children. In each place, I became increasingly aware of how geography, climate, and ecological systems shape cultural rhythms—how people move through space, how knowledge is transmitted, and how creativity emerges in response to local conditions. Culture revealed itself not as an abstract idea, but as something embedded in daily interaction with land and materials.

In Belize, where access to commercial art supplies was very limited, I learned how earlier generations created rich dyes from the bark of trees indigenous to the region. An elder demonstrated the process for a group of children and myself, cutting bark from a logwood tree with a machete and boiling it over an open fire until the liquid condensed into a dense, vibrant redish purples dye. Later on I used the dye as ink with reed pens and as watercolor with brushes. What stayed with me was not only the color itself, but the knowledge carried through the process—how material, environment, and cultural memory were inseparable. The act of making was also an act of remembering place.

Following the events of 9/11, I found myself seeking work that felt stabilizing and restorative. This led me toward wildlife rehabilitation and field observation, including foster-care work with hummingbirds. These experiences were not dramatic. They were slow and attentive, requiring patience, repetition, and sensitivity to subtle change. During this period, my relationship to time shifted. Observation became less about gathering information and more about cultivating presence.

Writing and drawing outdoors developed naturally from this way of working. These practices offered a means of slowing down and noticing what is often overlooked—patterns of movement, shifts in light, traces of human and non-human activity. In anthropology, field notes serve as a bridge between experience and understanding. Similarly, drawing functions not simply as illustration, but as inquiry. Sculpture extends this inquiry further, bringing the body into direct conversation with material. Weight, balance, resistance, and scale require a different kind of attention—one that mirrors how people physically inhabit and shape their environments.

While in Kenya, I stayed in a small village in Migori County where homes were built from mud bricks with thatched roofs. Walking through the village felt at times like stepping into an old painting. I was able to watch the process of making the mud bricks used to build homes and ovens for baking bread.

Two or three men would dig deep into the clay soil, mixing the earth with water and straw by stomping on it—much like grapes are stomped to make wine. At times the work took on a rhythm, almost like a dance, with bursts of laughter and song as they worked knee-deep in mud. The mixture was then pressed into wooden molds to form bricks and left to dry slowly in the sun, sometimes covered so they would not crack.

 Weeks later, the dried bricks were stacked into a pyramid-like structure. Small tunnels were left at the base for burning firewood, and the entire structure was plastered with mud to hold in the heat. The kiln burned for nearly a full day, watched carefully so the heat remained slow and steady. What struck me was not only the ingenuity of the process, but the intimacy between people and material. Knowledge was carried through practice—through watching, doing, and adjusting to the behavior of earth, water, and fire.

Throughout the village, creativity appeared in everyday acts. Women wove baskets and made intricate beadwork jewelry. Despite deep poverty and reliance on donated clothing from western countries, resourcefulness transformed what was available. The "Grannies" would carefully unravel donated sweaters and re-knit the yarn into warm blankets for their families; see above photo.  A single dress might be remade into two garments for small children. What could have been seen only as scarcity instead revealed a quiet culture of adaptation and making.

Through long stretches of attention, I came to see that careful looking is not only a way of documenting people, wildlife, and natural processes, but a way of understanding culture as relational. Place mediates how people interact with one another, what materials artists work with, how stories are formed, and how meaning becomes embedded in everyday practices. These relationships reveal themselves gradually, without the need to categorize or define them too quickly.

Although my studio work is largely abstract, abstraction for me is not a departure from lived experience but a distillation of it. Abstract forms carry the residue of movement, memory, and spatial awareness rather than literal representation. Learning to look closely and engage with materials fosters a grounded relationship to one’s surroundings and encourages respect for both place and community.

Practices rooted in attentive engagement cultivate skills that extend well beyond art-making. Attentiveness, curiosity, and reflection are foundational to understanding culture in any context. When we spend time with a place—its ecosystems, materials, built environments, people, and the rhythms connecting them—we begin to recognize how culture continuously shapes creative expression.

In this way, art does not stand apart from culture. It rises from within it—emerging through the ways people live, work, adapt, and respond to the environments they inhabit. At its best, art becomes "alive" in the world: open, responsive, and willing to learn from what is already there.

©️Sherburn LaBelle 

Published on Medium 03/11/ 2026 

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