In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson hangs with sculptor and former park ranger Laurel Roth Hope.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In this Episode, Emily features artist Laurel Roth Hope. Laurel discusses her journey from a conservation worker to a full-time artist, emphasizing her use of recycled materials in her sculptures. She shares her creative process, influences, and collaborations with her husband, artist Andy Diaz Hope. The episode highlights her current residency at Recology, San Francisco, where she creates art from landfill materials. Laurel's work often reflects themes of ecological impact and human interaction with the natural world.
About Artist Laurel Roth Hope:
Laurel Roth Hope lives and works in Northern California. Prior to becoming a full-time, self-taught artist she worked as a park ranger and in natural resource conservation. These professional experiences influenced her current work, which centers on the human manipulation of and intervention into the natural world and the choices we must make everyday between our individual desires and the well being of the world at large. Hope was a 2025 SF Recology AIR Artist in Residence, a 2020 Space Program SF Resident Artist, a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and a 2016 Resident Artist with the Kohler Arts and Industry program in Wisconsin. In 2013 she and her sometime collaborator, Andy Diaz Hope, completed a year-long Fellowship at the de Young Museum of San Francisco examining the history of human cooperation through architecture. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Mint Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 21C Museum, the Zabludowics Collection, the Progressive Collection, and the Ripley’s Museum of Hollywood, among others. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery of San Francisco.
Visit Laurel's Website: LoLoRo.com
Follow Laurel on Instagram, CLICK HERE.
Learn about the Recology exhibit, CLICK HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
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Laurel Roth Hope: I didn't have a lot of exposure to art growing up.I came from a very working class family where being able to take care of yourself and be very reasonable and safe was important. And art never seemed like a career, that art is not safe. It's not a reasonable career, but I loved making things.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Laurel Roth. Hope the guest on this week's episode of Art is Awesome.
I am your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco often covering the arts. And I've [00:01:00] been meeting such great people that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work.
Years ago, Laurel Roth Hope worked in conservation and as a park ranger that influences her work as an artist. Which has to do with the natural world and human intervention. Laurel has done many residencies, including at the Space Program in San Francisco and Kohler Arts and Industry in Wisconsin. Her work is in permanent collections of the Smithsonian, New York's Museum of Art and Design, Crystal Bridges, Museum of American Art and others.
Currently, she's doing a four-month residency at Recology, the San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Station, Laurel and the other artists will show their work on May 16th and 17th, and there will be artist talks the evening of May 20th. I met her at her studio [00:02:00] there, which she had furnished with the desk and chairs for herself and her daughter that she'd pulled in from the piles outside.
Most days, she and the other artists go out with a cart to look for items they can use. Wearing safety gear. Laurel showed me the bodies she's making out of plywood.
Laurel Roth Hope: Regular wood, untreated wood is recyclable, but plywood is a, it's a very common building material, um, but it's not recyclable, so it does go into landfill. So I'm trying to find clean enough, straight enough pieces of that to work with. I'm coming up with templates. To trace onto those, cut it out, layer it together, glue it together.
Even the clamps that I'm using to glue it together, I found in the, in the pile out there, and then carving it back away to make these skeletons, which are then the framework for building bodies. So all the different parts of the bodies are. Things I've found in the landfill.
Host Emily Wilson: The work she's doing at Recology [00:03:00] fits in with her usual practice of showing how we reflect the landscape around us.
Laurel Roth Hope: It's based on me thinking about how we are reciprocally tied to the environment. Anything that we do to affect the environment in turn is gonna come back and affect us. Like microplastics in our bodies has been in the news a ton lately, which really shouldn't be that much of a surprise. But our bodies are literally built from the air, the soil, and the water around us.
Plants that we eat, grow in the soil and are taking up nutrients from the soil and the water that animals, if we eat those, those are eating the plants. So we are literally. Built of our environments and anything we do to the environment is gonna come back around.
Host Emily Wilson: Laurel likes making use of items in the trash.
Laurel Roth Hope: I bring everything out here and give it a good scrub down with either rubbing alcohol or antibacterial soap or something. So a little cleaning zone. These are just a few things that I dragged in that aren't especially exciting, [00:04:00] but I like finding homes for everything. If I see something that can, I can imagine a new use for, I can't really let it go into the waste stream and landfill.
So I'm always texting people and like, can you use this? Can you use that?
Host Emily Wilson: On a work table Laurel had a lot of beads. She says you never know what you'll find.
Laurel Roth Hope: One day it's just gonna be wet drywall and things that smell bad. And the next day you might find, like in this case, I think somebody's entire craft room was being thrown away.
And so yeah, the beads were still in their boxes A lot of the time. It's loose jewelry that I kind of have to sort through other garbage to get and then take apart and sort and clean.
Host Emily Wilson: Over the years, Laurel has made some work with birds such as crocheting suits for penguins that disguise them as extinct birds and making peacocks out of beauty products like fake fingernails, nail polish, and barrettes.
I told her. They're very pretty.
Laurel Roth Hope: Prettiness is [00:05:00] something that I think about in that it catches people's interest and people are more likely to look at something and maybe open their mind to other concepts if there's prettiness as a hook to draw them in. It's kind of funny because I like birds. They're fine, but I don't like them more than other animals.
They're the animal, the wild animal that we're most likely to see. In any environment in the urban environment, like you've probably seen birds today. I don't know if you've seen any other wild animals, but you've probably seen birds and probably everyone else who's set foot outside has seen a bird. It's something that it works really well as a metaphor for how we impact the environment. 'cause they're there, they, well, they live in the same areas as us on literally a different plane.
Host Emily Wilson: Laurel loved being a ranger in Marin County Parks. Being a sculptor is even better.
Laurel Roth Hope: I felt very lucky to get to work as a park ranger. I didn't go to college. I was living on my own by the time I was 17 and couldn't navigate that system on my own.
[00:06:00] And usually to be a park ranger you have to have a degree. And so I felt very lucky to have worked through the system and gotten a good enough reputation in the area that I worked and everything to be a park ranger. But the one thing I would rather do is. To be a sculptor, and I think that's, that's mainly because of the ability to follow a train of thought or a question or an interest and really explore it on my own terms and figure out how to encapsulate all of that in a finished piece. It's definitely, it's a wonderful thing to be able to follow your own train of thought. It's not an easy career and it doesn't pay well, but I feel really lucky to have gotten to do the art as well.
Host Emily Wilson: Laurel sometimes collaborates with her husband, artist Andy Diaz Hope, who she met while they were working on a friend's project.
Laurel Roth Hope: I think that's a great way to get to know someone. We're both pretty focused on work in a playful sense, not like the typical definition of workaholic, but we [00:07:00] like what we do. And so whether it's building buildings or maintaining buildings is not usually as much fun, but sometimes there's creative ways to do it or making sculptures.
And when we collaborate, I think we each push each other. Sometimes we push each other's buttons, but we also push each other to take our ideas further. Uh, because when you're doing your own work, you can cut yourself slack. You're like, I know why I am doing this. So it's obviously a good thing to do where if you're collaborating with somebody, they're gonna ask you like, why?
Well, why would we do that? Do it that way. And so you have to really be able to have an argument for each thing.
Host Emily Wilson: Laurel has done a lot of residencies. She says they were all special. Working with a Smithsonian really stood out
Laurel Roth Hope: the first time the Smithsonian ever contacted me. Was it? It meant a lot to me, especially, like I said, I didn't go to college.
I didn't go to art school either. I've always felt like I was just kind of working along, getting along [00:08:00] by the seat of my pants, and so that was just very affirming. And I loved getting to work with scientists because among my art friends, I'm sort of known as a science nerd. I think I may have said this before, but once I started really talking to scientists, they all mentioned how much I just think like an artist, and I had never really realized that.
And I thought it was interesting to think about how these different pro professions actually approach the world, even if they have similar interests. Sometimes.
Host Emily Wilson: Laurel didn't plan to be an artist.
Laurel Roth Hope: I have always loved making things, but I didn't have a lot of exposure to art growing up and. I came from a very, like a working class family where being able to take care of yourself and be very reasonable and safe was important.
And art never seemed like a career that art is not safe, it's not a reasonable career, but I loved making things, uh, and. [00:09:00] I painted. I'm not an especially good painter, but I did paint and somewhere along the line I, um, I bought a Dremel and started making things, and it really grew from there. I think I, I, my brain thinks much better in three dimensions than in two dimensions.
Like I can draw, but I'm not great at it. There's nothing special about my drawing. I don't have a unique voice with it, but sculpture makes more sense to me. And so that's when it started taking off.
Host Emily Wilson: She remembers the first time she made something that seemed like sculpture.
Laurel Roth Hope: When I was a park ranger, I was walking on the beach doing a beach cleanup in kind of the slow season and found a, a ball, a round object on the beach.
And it was pretty worn out from rolling around in the bay. And I didn't know what it was, turned out to be a billiard ball, but I was curious what was inside of it, like was it the same on the inside as it was on the outside? So I took it back and cut it open and the material was. Kind of nice to cut through, like it's [00:10:00] solid all the way through.
And so I decided to carve it with my dremmel and ended up carving a small bird skeleton based on pieces of bird skeleton that I'd found in an owl pellet in another park. And I think that was the first thing that I would call sculpture that I'd ever done. And it really just started growing from there.
Host Emily Wilson: It took a while for her to quit her job and make art full-time.
Laurel Roth Hope: When Andy and I met, we decided to do a project in India that took us eight months. That was a design project, uh, with one of his old college friends. I. And as part of that, we had to quit our nice safe jobs that we'd had. There was some idea of returning to him when we got back, but we also both had always wanted to explore art more.
He was a little braver with that than me, and so we decided that we figured out what the least amount of money we could live on per month was, and saved up enough, which was like a thousand dollars a month at that point. This was 20 over 20 years ago, and we didn't have health insurance or anything, so you know, it was the bare minimum.
So we saved [00:11:00] up enough so that when we got back, we could just focus on art for six months. And I figured after that I'd go back to being a park ranger, but that I would never regret having six months to follow my own thought processes. I'd always wanted to go to college and never had the chance. So to me, this was like a kind of homeschool college, homeschool art school.
And after those six months, like we'd kind of had little bits of success enough that we were like, we can do this another six months. And then it just kept going, and now it's been 20 years.
Host Emily Wilson: She thinks making art about ecology can be an effective way of communicating.
Laurel Roth Hope: When I was talking to the colleges and different scientists at the Smithsonian, some of them weren't that interested in art and.
So one of the things I talked to them about was like there's a whole audience out there who's never gonna read a scientific paper, but if I can present it in a different way, they might start showing interest in it through art. It's not the same thing as a scientific paper, obviously, but it might [00:12:00] spark interest in people to learn more and or see the world a little bit differently.
Host Emily Wilson: Recology has made her loosen up in her practice. Laurel says.
Laurel Roth Hope: I can tend to get very detailed and obsessive, and I can't do that to the same degree here. Both. I don't have the same control over what I'm working with. I can only work with what I'm finding. So it's not like I can source the perfect piece of walnut to carve.
I'm gonna be carving this plywood, but also I'm only here for four months, so I can't work as slowly as. I sometimes tend to, and I think that's really good for me 'cause I, I have followed the path of being a little bit slow and obsessive a little too far.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, three questions where I ask the guests the same three things. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that had an impact on you, and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?[00:13:00]
Laurel Roth Hope: I don't think I can answer when I first knew I was an artist, because I don't really believe in a full definition of the word artist. When I didn't have studio space, I spent a lot of time gardening. And honestly, the energy that I put into my yard was very similar to the energy that I put into my studio.
Some people knitting is their art. Some people cooking is their art, so I can't say when I first knew I was an artist. And I think that the art world is a very, very tricky thing because there aren't. Obvious markers of success that would let you understand if you're a quote unquote real artist. Very, very few artists that I know actually support themselves on making their work, but they're still professional artists, so I, I can't, I can't say that I know when I knew that I was.
I've definitely been [00:14:00] influenced and impacted by other people's work. I love Fred Thomas's work and I felt so lucky to get to show with him at the Smithsonian once Ruth Asawa’s work hits on another level. I'm trying to think of some of the others. Some of the early women surrealists. I love the dreamlike quality of their work.
The Bay Area is full of creative and inspiring places. When I worked for the Marin Conservation Corps, I worked on Mount Tam, and Mount Tam is an amazing, it's so close and there's so many different ecologies there. And the first job I did there, we were rebuilding the cataract trail, and so we actually carried the railroad ties in on our shoulders to build the steps.
Then spent time like we brought in, carrying by hand. We brought in jackhammers. I. And you know, chiseled away bits of stone to get the path to go in the right [00:15:00] directions. You know, that kind of working with the environment may be something that kind of led down the art path as well.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you so much to Laurel Roth Hope, our guest. She and the other artists at Ecology will show their work on Friday, May 16th from five to eight and Saturday May 17th from 12 to three. There will be an Artist Talk Tuesday, May 20th from five to seven 30. Check out their ecology website to learn more, and thank you for listening.
Please follow the show and leave a rating. Preferably five stars and join us next time when our guest is Painter Emilio Villaba. He has a show opening at Dolby Chadwick in San Francisco on May 1st, Everything is Something. He also curated a show of two Bay Area figurative painters at [00:16:00] the gallery at the Canada College where he teaches, it's called Paul Warner and Theopolis Brown Painting is its own language.
It's up for free through May 15th.
Art is Awesome is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Go-to Productions. It is carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 FM San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Incomptech Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome podcast or visit our website. Till next [00:17:00] time.