SALT is profiling the best emerging artists to keep your eye on for 2014. Cutting edge techniques, boundary-pushing subject matter, and innovative in their fields: this series explores the Top 5o Contemporary Artists.

First on our list is a photographer that will change the way you think about climate change. Rachel Sussman showcases real plant species that have survived for millennia. Her work is beautiful, thought-provoking, and merges at the unusual intersection of science and art.

Her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World,  profiles some of our earth’s ancient living plants that are essentially on their deathbed, and might be vanishing soon.

Rachel Sussman was recently named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. To qualify for such a prestigious honor, applicants are pooled with 4000 of the best contemporary artists, and then are deemed to have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for exceptional creative ability in the arts above their highly talented peers. Before they vanish due to the environmental impact of climate change and the human footprints, she documents the oldest living species our planet has kept alive. Her work includes exploring plants like Pando, the “Trembling Giant,”-  a colony of aspens in Utah with a massive underground root system estimated to be around 80,000 years old. Or the dense Llareta plants in South America that grow 1.5 centimeters anually and live over 3,000 years.

“The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been created in the arts or sciences.”

Photo By: Laura Holder

RACHEL SUSSMAN IS A CONTEMPORARY ARTIST BASED IN BROOKLYN.

For nearly a decade, she’s been developing the critically acclaimed project “The Oldest Living Things in the World,” for which she researches, works with biologists, and travels all over the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older. Stewart Brand calls her work “the missing science of biological longevity.” She’s received numerous awards, and spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, and UCLA, amongst others, and appeared on the air on CNN, BBC, and various public radio programs. Her exhibition record spans more than a decade in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, and her photographs and writing have been featured on global media outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and NPR’s Picture Show. Jerry Saltz says of her work: “These stately pictures quiet the soul…Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet.”  Her first book is due out in Spring 2014 from the University of Chicago Press.   You can learn more about Sussman’s project in her 2010 TED Talk.

Rachel’s book, The Oldest Living Things In The World, was released on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2014 and is available for purchase on Amazon.