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“A lawn does not have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch; are they still part of the lawn or not?”

–The Infinite Lawn, Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

To create lawn, the artist collected real grass blades and pressed them between the pages of a small hardbound book of love poems by Emily Dickinson. After scanning the recto and verso of each blade of grass, they were separated within a softbound copy of “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. The scans were then enlarged, printed, hand-cut, reassembled, painted around the edge, and given a wooden and metal base resembling a high heel, blade hilt, or a piece of framing hardware. The original blades of grass were laminated to be preserved as bookmarks for a “bibliography of grasses,” a collection of books containing passages describing grass or lawns. Each blade of grass from the source lawns and the artist’s lawn maintains its sharp, un-mowed point.

The artist's handmade lawn, artificially engineered ‘real’ lawns, natural components within a living lawn, and the "bibliography of grasses” converge to question which iterations are organic or fiction. Playfully complicating these multiplicities is worm, a singular growing sculpture of an earthworm first created in 2016 as a manifestation of the anxiety-ridden narrator of Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow.” worm finds a new environmental context in lawn, which mirrors the materiality of its collected, constructed, blended parts and expands its narrative potentialities.

About the Artist

Lydia Rosenberg is a visual artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and a B.F.A. from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR in Intermedia. Her work, primarily in sculpture, is concerned with the impact of language on our perception of the material world and the ways that narratives shape value systems as well as objects. Recent solo exhibitions include incomplete objects, Labor is a Medium, Santa Rosa, CA (2023) Lamp Store, Here Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA (2023); Do this while I wait, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA (2023); Spaghetti Restaurant, Basket Shop, Cincinnati, OH (2019); The Complete Subject, Napoleon Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2019). Upcoming exhibitions are Lamp Store, SOCIETY, Portland, OR (2025) and lawn, Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Visual Arts, Pittsburgh, PA (2025). Her recent exhibitions are part of an ongoing project of writing a novel-as-sculpture in which the text centers on objects and prompts the creation of installations and events which recreate and complicate the fiction. She is a co-founder of both Anytime Dept. an artist-run exhibition project based in Cincinnati, OH with Rebecca Steele (ca.2017-2013).

Image: Screenshot from Nov 3, 2024 Warhol Cam recording, documenting artist Lydia Rosenberg collecting two blades of grass from Andy Warhol’s grave site, later to be produced for lawn and for a private collection. Courtesy of Warhol Cam and the artist.