Artist Interview with Annabelle Sigmond: Unseen Worlds
Spring 2025 Artist-in-Residence at Flathead Lake Biological Station
Annabelle painting at swimming beach while in-residence at Flathead Lake Bio Station.
Photo by Eva Marie Maggi.
Describe your Open AIR Residency experience. For example, how did you spend your time, construct your space, or engage with the community?
My Open AIR Residency at the Flathead Lake Biological Station was an amazing experience. It was the perfect blend of peace and learning. The landscape was so beautiful it was hard to believe it was real. I wanted to spend every available moment outside. I often enjoyed walking along the nature trail, drawing at the lakefront, and exploring the Bio Station’s campus. The view from the swimming beach was my favorite. I think I went there every day to swim, read, draw, journal, and think. I also really appreciated the accommodations. I made my cabin cozy and truly felt at home there. I feel like I had a perfect mix of quiet contemplation and social engagement. The scientists and staff at the Bio Station were all amazing and I felt so welcomed by them. I always had an opportunity on my calendar to shadow someone’s work in the lab or follow them into the field. I was lucky enough to become friends with the other artists in my cohort. As the residency progressed, we spent more and more time together and I couldn’t have asked for better friends to make me feel at home, support me, and bounce ideas off of. I took so many photos that I ran out of storage three times within the month and deleted all my social media apps to make space for more videos of leaves and driftwood.
I collected some extremely beautiful rocks and my seasonal allergies had never bothered me less. I found an interest in polar plunges and painted in a thunderstorm so strong it rattled the cabin. I learned a lot about plankton and now they’re my number one muse. I can’t wait to continue learning about them and their unseen worlds. I left Montana a lot lighter than I entered, even with my truck packed to the brim with huckleberry jam, pine needles, and memories.
Annabelle’s favorite sunset in MT. Photo by Eva Marie Maggi.
Tell us more. How did the residency influence or change your artistic direction? Were there moments that surprised you or shifted your process?
This residency shifted my perspective on productivity and how I approach escapism. At Flathead Lake, I had the space to not only be inspired but to give ideas enough time to germinate into better art pieces. I was able to get a lot of rest as well as paint and sketch. Despite being able to work on my art full-time, my battery never depleted.
Prior to this residency, my paintings were more otherworldly, a fantastical escape from the mundane, and despite being inspired by nature, they didn’t look anything like this world. In Montana, I didn’t feel any need to create a fantasy universe because everything around me was so peaceful and perfect. My art is all about showing surrealism within real science, but my work since then is more grounded on earth. I find myself incorporating more trees, mountains, and lakes into my composition ideas, because Montana showed me there’s more magic in the real world than I had previously considered.
I had never experienced seeing so many stars before this residency. Views like this made Flathead Lake seem otherworldly. - Annabelle
What are you reading/watching/or listening to?
During my residency, I listened to a lot of dark fantasy music and the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow (the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole version) about ten thousand times. I read Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro and Cornelia Funke, Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. I’m currently listening to Lorde’s latest album and reading Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green.
The view from Annabelle’s cabin window on the day of the first rainbow.
Can you break down the decisions behind a specific work from your residency, from the initial concept to the final details?
During my residency, I did a small oil painting of a double rainbow touching down in Flathead Lake. This piece was inspired by looking out my cabin window to see a real-life rainbow spilling out of the cloud next to me into Yellow Bay and touching down right where the Bio Station’s main building was. I ran outside into the drizzling rain for a better look and stayed out there looking until it dissipated back into the clouds. It felt magical and perfectly encapsulated how the region surrounding Flathead Lake is stuffed to the brim with beauty. I sketched from a photo I took. I did four thumbnail sketches of different compositions until I found one that I liked best.
After that, I sketched it onto a small canvas and painted it by section, starting with the foreground and ending at the background, which in hindsight might’ve not been the best way to go about it. In the painting, the rainbow is made into a physical object that breaks and ripples through the water’s surface, partly because I wanted to show that this rainbow felt like a tangible form in this moment. The way light would alter the landscape was so fascinating to me, so in this painting, light itself is the main character.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Annabelle Sigmond, 2025, oil on canvas
This piece also serves as the prologue to my next painting series. I was inspired by the scientists and researchers at the Bio Station. I loved visiting Marcy in the lab and picking her brain on all the plankton present in the lake. She taught me about the Phytoplankton and how they eat sunlight and how they feed every animal around them. I’d like to develop more work depicting food webs and the relationships of living things, especially the smallest ones we can't see. The rainbow is a way in which we can see light itself and thus it is the base of the ecosystem since it feeds the Phytoplankton, so this piece is also devoted to that process. This was also a bit of warm-up practice for me since I hadn’t painted a tree in at least a few years prior to this residency. My work has been about abstracting natural forms, so I was a little nervous to go back to referencing them head-on, but I’m very happy with how this piece turned out.
Annabelle’s painting, Food Web is included in the upcoming exhibition, OTHERWISE at Bob’s Your Uncle from Feb 6-Feb 27. She will be present at the opening reception!
Was there a particular 'aha' moment during your residency that shaped your creative process or the final outcome?
During the first weeks of the residency, I was unsure about what overarching body of work I wanted to create based on this experience and also about what I wanted to present for the FLBS Arts Conference. This conference is where artists-in-residence share their work with the community. I was overthinking it and had a hard time feeling strong about any idea. Then one night, I was out with my cohort friends Eva and Olivia. We got the best Korean food I’ve ever had, and accompanied Olivia to the water so she could film the full moon. We all swam underneath it until we went numb. I saw Eva standing there in her hiking boots, bathing suit, and winter hat and she looked like an Exquisite Corpse to me. I realize this sounds like a rude thing to say, but I was referring to the surrealist drawing game. As I explained the concept to her, it hit me that this would be a perfect exercise for my Arts Conference Talk. I developed some Bio Station surrealist characters for the presentation. I wondered, what if the microscopic elements of our landscape were characters we could see and incorporate into our world? What if we elongated the exposure so that various aspects of Flathead Lake that normally occur at different times were all together in one painting? The more I learned, the more questions I had, and the more ideas I came up with.
This tree was a favorite spot for the FLBS cohort; it was climbable, a great muse and model, a meeting spot, and it had great acoustics for soundscapes. I often practiced plein air drawing and painting, and this was my favorite subject. - Annabelle
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
Visit These Links to Find Out More About Deborah
Annabelle’s website
Follow Annabelle
Watch Annabelle’s Exquisite Corpse Presentation at FLBS
