About

Paula Horrigan is a landscape architect now in the midst of a reset and realignment as she pivots towards visual arts as her primary form of expression. Landscapes have always been her teachers. Shaped by natural forces and human intent, they gather meaning, memory, and matter across time. As an artist, gardener, educator, and landscape architect, Paula explores these living systems and create ways for people to see and dwell more attentively within them. Working in drawing, printmaking, and visual books, Paula engages landscape as both subject and collaborator. Each work invites slowing down, looking closely, and sensing our entanglement with the earth.

Before turning full-time to fine arts, Paula was a Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, a leader in placemaking and community design, and the founder of the Rust to Green Project in Upstate NY. She is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) and an editor of several books including, most recently, Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools (Routledge, 2024). Paula received her BA in Fine Arts and American Civilization from Brown University (1979) and her MLA in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University (1987). She is a licensed landscape architect in NY State.

Paula is now based in Clarkdale, Arizona, engaging with desert environments and a long-term, field-based art project centered on roads—tracing their paths, histories, and presence across terrains. She is also currently pursuing a ‘late-in-life’ Master of Fine Arts in Clark University’s low-residency MFA program.