Visiting Artist Aidan Koch centers ecological storytelling and non-human animal relationships

Aidan Koch: Mountain Tongue
August 28 – November 14, 2025
Lupin Foundation Gallery, Dodd Galleries

Artist Lecture: Tuesday August 26, Dodd S150, 5:30 pm

Opening: Thursday, Sept 4, 2025, 5 – 7 pm

The Dodd Galleries present Aidan Koch’s (American, b. 1988) solo exhibition Mountain Tongue, curated by the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Lindsey Reynolds, Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies and Art Librarian.

Join Koch for her Visiting Artist and Scholar (VAS) Lecture, on Tues, Aug 26 at 5:30pm in room S150. Koch will be in Athens and at the Dodd for several days hand drawing the opening sequence from her short story Man Made Lake as a wall work that will activate the exhibition in the Lupin Gallery.

Since moving to the Mojave Desert in 2018, Aidan Koch has explicitly focused on ecological storytelling and non-human animal relationships. Working primarily in comics, Koch employs various installation methods to reformat the book into physical space. In Mountain Tongue, she asks, What is the language of the mountain? This installation works conceptually as a deconstructed comic, including characters, setting and text brought together through sculpture, animation, and the viewer’s engagement. Unlike a classic narrative, where human and animal characters are given protagonist roles with landscape acting as a backdrop, here the mountain is the agent of the story. In animating the mountain, Koch brings to life the interconnections between the static, sculptural characters and inverts geologic time. An accompanying book of written texts in poetic, fable form compliments the installation.

Also on view will be the original manuscript of Koch’s comic Stone Blue Sky, where attention is given to language as operating and changing in relation to place. These works, drawn in graphite, gouache, and soft pastel, were intended primarily for print and therefore include marginal notes and uneven edges, artifacts from their development. This offers insight into the process, which is done 1:1 with no digital editing. In the narrative, two different species seek to connect. One species has recently arrived while the other holds a vast understanding of language and culture, stemming from their generational knowledge center at the pond. In Stone Blue Sky, Koch’s comics use image and language to compliment and complicate communication to capture subtle emotional and psychological experiences.

Supplementing the exhibition in the gallery will be a display of environmental comics curated by Koch in the Art Library (N201).

About Aidan Koch 

Aidan Koch (b. 1988, Seattle) is an artist and graphic novelist who lives and works in the Mojave Desert on unceded Serrano land. She is the author of several graphic novels including Xeric Award winning, The Blonde Woman (2012), After Nothing Comes (2016) and Spiral and Other Stories (2024); with short works featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Best American Comics 2014, and MoMA PS1 GNY Series. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, South Bend Museum of Art and Queens University, Belfast, among others. Koch’s ongoing projects—Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations and Environmental Comics—act as pedagogical and collaborative extensions of her ecological inquiries.

For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Dodd Galleries and Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu. The Dodd Galleries are open M-Fri in the main Lamar Dodd School of Art building, from 9am-4:30pm. The Lamar Dodd School of Art is closed on weekends, University holidays, and home game days.

Aidan Koch: Mountain Tongue is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Lupin Gallery Endowment. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu