Listen with your ears, eyes and feet in this Mulvane Art Museum exhibit

When’s the last time you stopped and listened to a tree?

No, really — when’s the last time you paused for a moment, took a break from your busy thoughts and just listened by noticing?

This is not an accusation. Rather, it’s an invitation — to take that moment and notice the world for what it is and what it could be — in Rachel Epp Buller’s exhibit “Invitations to Listen” at Washburn University’s Mulvane Art Museum.

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Epp Buller, who is a professor of visual arts and design at Bethel College in North Newton, said the exhibit is about thinking to how the public can listen in ways beyond just their ears.

"What can we do to have greater sensory awareness of place, of each other, with our whole bodies?" the feminist art historian said. "A lot of the work is inviting people to listen in a different way, or a more intentional kind of way. We often see things at a glance, or we hear things in a cursory way, but to pay attention is a different thing. This work, then, is about inviting people to listen."

Walking as a form of listening

The idea for the exhibit came to Epp Buller a little over a year ago, as she was undergoing winter at the University of Alberta while on a teaching residency. There, she regularly went on winter walks along the north Saskatchewan River Valley to try to get a sense of the place and learn as much about it, as a guest in that vast wilderness.

The result was the exhibit, which features various artefacts from those walks. One of those is "One Hundred Days of Walking," which catalogues — in watercolor blotches folded into accordion books suspended from the ceiling — over three months of Epp Buller's treks.

Other pieces are laser-engraved graphite stills of snow-saddled trees and winter landscapes from the walks, alongside printed poems. A speaker on the wall also plays snippets of the poems, for those who are better auditory listeners.

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The exhibit even has an outdoor piece in the form of "Winter Walking," which are signs put up on the pathways around Washburn's campus. Each has a scannable QR code which allows participants to hear Epp Buller narrate one of her winter walks.

It's all part of an effort to offer members of the public various entry points into the work, Epp Buller said. Museums can be off-putting places for a lot of people, but much of the exhibit is specifically about inviting people in with accessible ideas and themes.

"The art students will always be receptive, because they’re primed for that, but it’s the people who maybe think museums aren’t for them that we hope to reach," Epp Buller said.

Mulvane art exhibit is an invitations to listen — and heal

Much of the exhibit focuses on trees, since Epp Buller found them especially intriguing as she traversed the Canadian winter wilderness. A Nebraska native, those Alberta plains reminded her of home in the Midwest, save for the disparate conifers and evergreens.

"There’s a different height to a lot of them, but one thing I noticed on my daily walks was that we, as humans, have a tendency to think of trees generally," Epp Buller said. "But if you walk by one more repeatedly, it becomes more individualized and familiar. You notice how a tree changes from when it’s covered in snow compared to when spring is coming, or between morning and evening. You notice the differences, because you’ve seen it lots of times."

"It’s the same way with people," the art professor continued. "You can see a crowd of people and it’s just people, but once you get to know one of the people, they become individualized and familiar to you."

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Epp Buller's exhibit incorporates themes from this WUmester's centered on health and healing. WUmesters are a university-initiative to "foster a university-wide conversation on a topic related to social justice that will change each spring semester."

For her part, Epp Buller has worked across university disciplines to incorporate the idea of listening, even across subjects like history and biology.

It's all part of an effort to get more people to pause and listen, even if but for a moment.

"For me, listening has a real sense of urgency in our world," Epp Buller said. "If we hope to heal our world or to have better relations with other people or the planet, I think it’s urgent that we start paying better attention.

"Listening has to do with heightening the attention of all of our senses, and attuning to place in a different way."

Rachel Epp Buller's art exhibition "Invitations to Listen" is at Washburn University's Mulvane Art Museum through June 2023.

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Rachel Epp Buller's 'Invitations to Listen' is at Washburn's Mulvane