Daniela Naomi Molnar

Artist Statement

Working with color, water, language, and place, my art explores memory—planetary, cultural, familial, and bodily. These memories are alive in the present and have the potential to shape our future. My work creates vessels in which memories transform: books, poems, essays, films, paintings, sculptures, exhibits, classes, and installations.

To access these memories, I make pigments from stones, flowers, roots, bones, glacial melt, and rainwater, each sourced from specific biomes. These pigments create palettes of place that celebrate the earth’s imagination and resilience. Working with the earth this way has taught me that memories can permeate across vast timescales and disparate places, species, and generations.

Poems and essays arise alongside the pigments and paintings, exploring the same questions and ideas. The two practices overlap and inform each other. I understand writing and pigment-making as parallel practices. Both rely on careful attention and transformation, a balance of discipline and dissipation. And both are ways to access and transform memories—my own, those of my family, and those of the earth.

My current work exploring memory began with a lifelong love of wild places. I sought out places where I felt I could be in conversation with the other-than-human, eventually venturing far from the city parks of my youth into remote wildernesses worldwide. Time in these places allowed me to unravel some of the knots I’d inherited. I learned to slow down and be quiet and attentive. I found that, with practice, I was sometimes able to translate my experiences into poems and paintings, colors and words. Doing so felt freeing and meaningful. I stuck with it. To this day, I understand my primary medium as place.

Though I engage with challenging themes, I see each of my creations as a resilient ecosystem offering sensory immersion, beauty, and the possibility of exchange.

Daniela Naomi Molnar

Artist Bio

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her paintings are created with pigments she has made from plants, bones, stones, rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the pigments and paintings; the practices overlap and influence each other, creating new ecologies. Her debut book CHORUS  won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure was published by Ayin Press in June of 2025. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind, a book written in collaboration with glaciers (Omnidawn, October 2026) and Light / Remains, a book of visual art, poems, and essays. Her work is the subject of a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times, a PBS Oregon Art Beat profile, an entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia, and a feature in Poetry Daily. Her artwork has been shown nationally, is in public and private collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and helped start and run the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire from 2008 – 2022. She lives in Portland, Oregon where the forest meets the city. www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar