Wildness Observed: The Art of Anna E. Orbovich

“I search for wildness,” writes Anna E. Orbovich, and in those four words, you can feel the compass of her work swing into focus. Wildness isn’t just the untamed sweep of an Arctic plain or the sheer drop of a canyon rim. It is also the quiet curve of a puddle after rain, the way moss creeps across a sidewalk crack, or the way the Mississippi River shifts shade by shade with the seasons. For Orbovich, who has lived and researched everywhere from Iceland’s lava fields to Chile’s Atacama Desert, the return to her home state of Minnesota offered a new way of seeing. “Wild and wildness are fluid,” she says. “They can exist as a mindset, a feeling, or an action.” Now based in St. Paul, she finds herself drawn to “the small quiet moments of wildness that I often overlooked.”

Portrait of Anna E. Orbovich

Her exhibition, wildness observations over time, now on view at the Ely Area Community Hub, is both an invitation and a meditation: a collection of drawings, prints, and cyanotypes that trace her relationship with the land and the layered ways we experience it. A trail, a river, a bluff. On paper, they become lines, textures, fragments. Orbovich calls her images “maps that lead nowhere,” but that is not quite right. They lead to an experience, to a pause, to the humbling act of slowing down and paying attention. Her process is as much a conversation with the earth as it is a record of it. Blind-contour drawings, where she never lifts her pencil or looks at the paper, allow her to lose herself in observation rather than accuracy. Cyanotypes, sun prints made with found objects, light-sensitive paper, and water, become collaborations with nature itself. “They truly feel like collaborations with the earth,” she says.

Her path to this work was shaped by summers in the field. In 2015, Orbovich spent a season as a Trail Maintenance Intern for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest. Clearing drains, sawing fallen trees, leading volunteer crews. It was demanding, physical work, the kind that embeds itself into muscle memory. “At the time, I didn’t think too much about how it related to my art practice,” she reflects. “But now I continually think back to trail work and how humans interact with wild spaces.” That summer, and the one before it in Iceland’s Highlands, became part of the foundation of her art, a reminder that creation and stewardship are entwined.

Many artists talk about nature as escape, but Orbovich frames it differently. “Wildness is constantly asking me to slow down, listen, reflect, collaborate, allow for uncertainty, and ultimately speak up for it.” Her work is quietly political, not through slogans, but through a simple truth: if we stop paying attention, the wildness we love could disappear. Her prints and drawings whisper an invitation to pay closer attention, to see, to protect.

The trail sometimes leaves its mark on her as much as she leaves it untouched. She still remembers the salt of the Atacama Desert in Chile, “so thin at times the light would shine through it onto the paper and create very cosmic looking prints.” Not all trail memories are beau

tiful. Hiking in New Hampshire one autumn, she and her husband passed a group descending the mountain with glasses of champagne and a speaker playing music. At the summit, they found the corks and foil wrappers scattered across the ground. “It wasn’t something I wish to unsee,” she says carefully, “but it felt very disrespectful to the land and to other hikers that day.” Even these moments of frustration fuel her practice, a reminder of the fragile contract between humans and the wild.

wildness observations over time does not ask you to stand still. It asks you to wander. The pieces move from “micro moments along a riverbed” to “silhouettes of tree bark as if it were moss” to “rocky shorelines in the distance.” “It’s a little bit like being on a hike or paddle and stopping every so often to pause and get lost in something you might typically pass over,” she says. When asked what she hopes visitors will whisper to themselves when they leave her exhibition, her answer is simple: “This makes me want to get outside and explore.”

wildness observations over time is available to view during the operational hours of the Ely Area Community Hub from August 1 through the end of September. Step into Orbovich’s world, and you may find yourself stepping back out with a renewed sense of how much wildness is still waiting to be seen.