Meadow Series
Montalvo’s Meadow Series is a body of work that explores ephemeral somatic environments spaces that are felt before they are understood. Using living materials, movement, light, and reflection, each meadow is composed as an encounter rather than an object. The installations invite the body to slow, alter breath, and return to presence through subtle motion, proximity, and change. They are not representations of landscape, but lived experiences of it. Functioning as a contemporary counterpoint to the history of landscape representation, the meadows shift the landscape from image to encounter.
Meadow Exploration I: The Vertical Field
Meadow Exploration II: The Field Within
Meadow Exploration III: The Unsettled Interior
Meadow Exploration IV: Atmospheric Study at First Light
Meadow Exploration V: Contained Meadow System
Meadow Exploration VI: Refracted Meadow Environment
Meadow Exploration VI: Filtered Meadow Atmosphere
Research Context
The Meadow Series functions as an ongoing research body investigating how immersive botanical environments shape embodied spatial perception. These speculative installations are developed through iterative visual and spatial studies that explore botanical density, light, material temporality, and sensory experience.
Digital visualisation and AI-generated spatial studies are used as conceptual prototyping tools, allowing environments to be tested, layered, and refined prior to physical installation. These studies support the development of research-led installation practice examining living materials as atmospheric spatial media.
This work forms the foundation for my ongoing investigation into immersive botanical environments as forms of experiential and ephemeral architecture.
Process
Each meadow study is developed through layered spatial prototyping, combining botanical material research, environmental composition, and digital visualisation. Studies explore variations in density, scale, light interaction, and spatial sequencing to investigate how botanical environments influence bodily movement and sensory awareness.
Research Trajectory
Emerging from a 14-year professional practice working with botanical materials, the work now focuses on research-led installation exploring atmosphere, perception, and embodied spatial experience.
About The Artist
Kayla Montalvo (b. 1990, California) is an installation artist whose work investigates immersive botanical environments as somatic spatial experiences. Influenced by her lived experience with panic disorder, her practice explores how environments influence nervous system regulation, perception, and embodied awareness.
Working with living materials, movement, light, and temporality, she approaches landscape as an environmental condition rather than a fixed location. Through site-specific and ephemeral installation practice, her work examines how sensory spatial environments can alter attention, restore perceptual awareness, and create moments of atmospheric encounter.
Her current work develops botanical installations as instruments for attentional recalibration spaces where embodied presence and environmental responsiveness become mutually constructed.
