Gaea Cherissa Dukelow is an artist and field ecologist based in Fairbanks who works primarily in painting and drawing. In her series of paintings, Earthscapes, she renders landscape scenes from aerial and satellite imagery in oil paint. The scenes chosen for these works are places of significance—they tell stories of lands, cultural importance, landscape change, resource extraction, or climate change. Cherissa’s work explores both visuals and concepts of the vast, ancient, and miraculous beauty of the Earth, as well as the conflicted thoughts and emotions we experience as we observe our own dramatic impacts on the Earth in the Anthropocene. This series of paintings was exhibited in the Lemonade Stand in the Fall of 2020 in collaboration with the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, which recognized Cherissa as their Featured Artist of 2020.

Originally from Lenapehoking—the Lenape name for the region now known as Southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and lower New York state—she draws comparisons between the futurist East Coast world of fragmented ecosystems, intentional forgetting of the violent displacement of original peoples, urbanization and subdivided neighborhoods with the romanticized, nostalgic notion of wilderness and the Alaskan “Last Frontier.” Cherissa has received formal training in fine art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), spent time learning to see the world in terms of ecological systems at State University of New York, College of Environmental Science (ESF), and engaged in work and projects involving environmental science, policy, outreach, and activism. This background informs her work as she reaches toward an understanding of our complex, dynamic world-mixing intuition, storytelling, science, and information-gathering. In practicing her craft, she seeks ever to learn, unlearn, and relearn.