Rural Minnesota woman creates tiny landscapes inspired by the country’s national parks

It always starts with a simple thumb movement.

Grace Vanderbush flattens a ball of sky-colored polymer clay onto a round brass pendant. She then begins to layer and sculpt a small scene, creating a portable landscape the size of a coin.

Vanderbush creates clay necklaces depicting miniature scenes from each of the country’s 63 national parks. She also sculpts pendants depicting ladybug-sized bison, mini floral arrangements and scenes from U.S. Park Service sites like Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. She sells her work online and at her Earth Clay booth at art fairs in Minnesota and across the United States.

(Earth Clay’s next stops in Minnesota are the Minnehaha Falls Art Fair, July 19-21, and the Minnesota State Fair, August 22-September 2.)

With her husband Jordan, Vanderbush has visited about half of the country’s national parks and they plan to take in more each year. During their hikes, she takes photos of vistas and close-ups of rocks and wildflowers. Back in her home studio near rural Canby, Minnesota, she uses these photos as inspiration.

His workbench sits next to large windows overlooking the flat fields of this agricultural countryside near the South Dakota border. Tiny balls of colored clay are scattered within easy reach, and images of iconic scenes from the park are usually placed nearby.

Sense of belonging

The landscape collars of Vanderbush State Park feature specific plants, rock formations, and color palettes, making the small scene instantly familiar to anyone who has visited the park. She layers clay in the exact colors of Badlands National Park’s ridged pinnacles at sunset and sculpts Arches National Park’s famous “delicate arch” in miniature, giving it a ¼-inch span.

She tries to discover the smallest details of each park’s ecosystem, she said.

“I think it really gives a sense of place to my work,” she said. “I’ll sculpt the mountain that you know — the iconic scene — but the texture might match that of the moss on a rock that you see when you’re hiking.”

To create texture, she pokes with a dental scaler and scrapes with ceramic tools to make bison fur look plush or bring a rocky shoreline to life.

For parks the Vanderbushes haven’t checked off their bucket list yet, like the rugged Gates of the Arctic in Alaska or the White Sands Desert in New Mexico, she relies on photos she finds in books and online. Earth Clay donates 10 percent of the profits from all national park artwork to the National Park Foundation, and some park stores sell the necklaces.

“We always dreamed of visiting all the national parks,” Vanderbush said. “And just making the trip a goal of ours — because we didn’t really get the opportunity to do that growing up.”

So far, his favorite national park is Grand Teton in Wyoming.

“It’s such a special place,” she said. “It’s just magical. There are valleys and open prairie areas that we really love because we live on the Minnesota prairie, but then there’s a huge mountain range.”

An improbable lead

Vanderbush can’t remember a time when she wasn’t making art. She brought her creations to the county fair as a 4-H member and carried a set of markers with her everywhere she went.

“I always had a backpack full of art supplies,” she said.

She left Canby to study art education at South Dakota State University in Brookings, where she met Jordan. The couple built a house across the street from where she grew up. Today, they enjoy small-town fun like Monday pizza nights at PK Egans on St. Olaf Avenue, Canby’s main drag, and are working to preserve and transform their land by planting grass and trees in a former cornfield.

Vanderbush was working as a substitute teacher when she created her first clay necklace design, inspired by a visit to Saguaro National Park in Arizona.

As her art business, which she launched in 2018, took off, she stopped teaching to focus on creating full time. Soon, her engineer husband left his job to become responsible for logistics and manufacturing Earth Clay’s displays.

As she travels to art fairs across the Midwest this summer, Vanderbush brings with her supplies to work on her miniature clay sculptures at her booth. Invariably, someone at every fair will notice the tiny, detailed work and make a familiar comment: “You’re going to go blind!” » said Vanderbush. (She doesn’t notice any eye strain.)

The Vanderbushes enjoy traveling and enjoying the freedom that their art fair life provides. And they love coming home to Canby, even though what they do may seem a bit mysterious to their neighbors in a place where most work as farmers or teachers, they said.

“At church, a man asked me, ‘What do you do?’ because I hadn’t seen him in a long time,” Grace Vanderbush said. “And I said, ‘I’m an artist.’”

He didn’t understand what she meant and asked, “An ortist?” What does an ortist do? » she remembers. “He made up a word, because it would be more likely than ‘artist,’” she said.

It may not be typical, but Vanderbush’s journey brings her a lot of joy. It takes her from chasing waterfalls in places like Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio to her kitchen in Canby, where she fires batches of her clay sculptures in the kiln to finish them.

And then she goes to the next art fair.