PriscillaStadler

Artist Statement / Bio

My work explores Newtown Creek, NYC's largest Superfund site, a four-mile tidal river between Queens and Brooklyn shaped by nearly 200 years of industrial dumping. My ongoing project, SLUDGE, draws from scientific literature, field research, and direct work with creek materials — water, sediment, mussel shells, and objects from its shores — using textile, print, drawing, zines, and video.
Weaving together science, art, pedagogy, and mysticism, I ask what kinds of knowledge contributed to this water's injuries, and what kinds of knowing have been excluded. By stitching onto labcoats, emblematic of scientific authority, I interrogate profit-driven Western knowledge, a framework that ignores ways of knowing carried by other-than-human species, such as the native ribbed mussels who filter its water.
Mussels and other wildlife are slowly returning to the Creek despite centuries of contamination. These bivalves are adapting: filtering organisms, hosting other species, and slowly rebuilding habitat. Over hundreds of years, mussels and their symbiotic partner cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) shaped the estuary sediment to form Mussel Island. Destroyed in the late 1920s for industrial shipping convenience, my recent MUSSEL MEMORY exhibition is an ode to that ghost island and its descendants. The stitched labcoats ask what knowledge looks like when it is embodied, worn, and shared with communities near a Superfund site, especially as federal environmental protections are being dismantled.
Community engagement is also central to my practice. Working alongside dancers, scientists, and community members, I share what I learn through learnshops, zines, and my alter ego ONC [The Oracle of Newtown Creek]. My goal is to make the Creek's difficult history approachable through what I like to call “sneaky pedagogy”, so more who live, work, or study nearby will become advocates for its cleanup, greater public access, and the multiple species trying to make it their home.

Artist Social

• Facebook: @priscillastudio
• Instagram: @atreeilove
• LinkedIn: priscillastadler