An image from Katie Mulligan's "No Man's Land: Reimagining the Myth of Cicero Swamp," an exhibit at ArtRage Gallery. Credit: Patrick McGuan | Central Current

Editor’s note: Patrick McGuan’s visual art column will regularly appear in Central Current.

Artist Katie Mulligan grew up ten minutes from Cicero Swamp, 5,000 acres of rare and varied wetlands at the northeast tip of Onondaga County, but her early understanding of the region was flattened by its regional nickname, Rattlesnake Gulch. No Man’s Land: Reimagining the Myth of Cicero Swamp, up now at ArtRage gallery, is the product of two years of her fieldwork and archival research into the area, the natural history of wetlands in the United States, and the shifting rhetorics that keep these ecosystems imperiled and stigmatized. Her work that began as an MFA thesis in illustration at Syracuse University has grown into activism and advocacy as construction for the Micron factory advances into the area.

Mulligan’s research for this project is embedded and exhaustive. When we spoke before the exhibition’s opening, she provided me with the geologic origin of Cicero Swamp at the glacial retreat 12,000 years ago alongside her first awareness of the area as a child learning to run inside at the sight of a pesticide-filled airplane heading toward the swamp. “I think because of those associations, I was always very fearful of the area,” Mulligan says, “I’ve just really been struck over the years by the mythology of Rattlesnake Gulch and this area that’s sort of mysterious, and there’s so much really crazy history there…I wanted to assess that and see what truth there was, also if Cicero Swamp is alone in its mythic history or the perception that it’s really scary or evil.”

Since starting her project, Mulligan has visited Cicero Swamp at least once each week. She describes the dense and biodiverse area as miraculous, and her documentation expanded to match the kaleidoscopic array of life in the area. Wetlands can change dramatically from one week to the next. What is dry one year could become a pond the next after a heavy rainfall, and this state of flux is key to supporting the biodiversity of the ecosystem. Some species rely on the habitat for reproduction or one stage of life before moving to another region, and Cicero Swamp is also an important site for migratory birds.

When we spoke, Mulligan had been paying attention to the Red-eyed Vireos that will eventually overwinter in the Amazon basin. “In terms of taking reference or documenting things, I just try to really take an abundance of things. I think I also record a lot of audio, like the birds that are shifting. I try to think about what things will highlight the abundance of life within the swamp while also thinking about what to compose into an illustration.”

No Man’s Land contains a range of media. Mulligan’s audio recordings flit through the gallery, and crochet sculptures and a wall hanging hold space between her printed drawings. These begin as pencil or goauche sketches before being scanned and finished in ProCreate. One group of prints are pages from an in-progress children’s book on the history and importance of wetlands in the US. Her drawings that focus on Cicero Swamp depart from the straightforward and naturalistic style of wildlife illustration to focus on sensory experience or document a history of threat and precarity.

In a color print of an Eastern Massagua, the rattlesnake that inspired the region’s nickname, the snake and ground are washed in an orange glow. A black and white drawing to its side brackets the snake in flames along with a 1965 quote pulled from the Syracuse Herald-Journal. That year’s hot and dry summer drove the snakes out of Cicero Swamp and into the fields near residential areas in the local townships. “There’s never been a recorded bite that I have found,” Mulligan says, “But during that summer, they would set fields ablaze and sheriffs would wait with guns for them to come out.”

Outside of her fieldwork, Mulligan devoted time to records at the Onondaga Historical Association, and the recorded history of Cicero Swamp seems almost a microcosm of Euro-American conceptions of the landscape. An ecosystem resistant to farming, logging, and navigation threatened the logics of dominion and extraction and carried the association of indigeneity. Mulligan tells me that a lot of the first colonists moving into the area were Revolutionary War veterans with orders from George Washington to eliminate the indigenous peoples and conquer the land that is now Cicero. “I’d say from that point forward, all the documentation of the swamp was about this great expanse of bog and muck that just needed to be dried…a lot of attempts aren’t necessarily successful, but a lot of the rhetoric around draining it is about making it productive for agriculture…it’s just agriculture, development, and industry.”

This lands in the present with a pair of drawings, made one year apart, of the landscape along Burnet Road at the Micron site. The image from 2025 is dense with vegetation and animal life thrumming under a tree canopy. The 2026 drawing shows the razed strata of a construction site behind industrial fencing and new powerlines dipping into an empty sky.

Micron has pledged to create two acres of wetlands for each of the approximately 200 acres of Cicero Swamp their facility destroys, but this promise can obscure just how severe and irreparable the damage will be. Swamps sequester a massive amount of carbon, and construction will release deposits that have been underground for thousands of years. During our conversation, Mulligan mentions an incident from the 1890s where a farmer trying to burn down a beehive in Cicero Swamp started a fire that lasted for six months after it spread into the underground peat. “There’s still remnants that show that that fire set back the ecosystem by about 500 years wherever it burned.”

Redirecting drainage to create nominal wetlands is a brief intervention. Coming close to recreating the biodiverse ecosystem of a healthy swamp is far more involved and requires decades of careful stewardship and intervention. A young ecosystem is vulnerable to opportunistic and introduced species. Recreating the elaborate web of plant and animal life that would stabilize the area is a tangle of unpredictable and uncontrollable contingencies. Insects and other invertebrates can be impossible to relocate, and species that rely on wetlands for part of their life cycle may not be able to migrate to the new site. 

I spoke with Christian Bright, a SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry Ph.D candidate in Environmental Science with a specialty in wetland ecosystem services, about the trouble of recreating swamps and their role in carbon sequestration. “Wetlands produce methane, which is a greenhouse gas, however they sequester a ton of carbon in their soils which helps to offset that.” Bright tells me that it takes a long time for the ecosystem to mature to the point that it becomes more of a sink for carbon than a source. “In a system like we might have in a marsh in Upstate New York, that could take 150 to 250 to 400 years.”

Bright also highlights the difference between wetlands ecosystems. “It’s easy for us to make a marsh. You just go out and add some water, add some herbaceous wetland plants…but actually trying to get the tree species to grow, and make these hummocks, and microtopography that occurs, and these beautiful, natural things…we haven’t figured out a good way to replicate that in the mitigation process.” 

Micron’s site will cover red maple swamps, hemlock-hardwood swamps, floodplain forests, and dogwood and willow shrub swamps. Fifty years out, a mitigation site can meet the broad definition of a wetland but with a fraction of the biodiversity and sequestered carbon of the original swamp.

Where corporate statements around mitigation minimize this complexity, Mulligan’s large drawings find a way to capture the viridity of interconnected life in Cicero Swamp by moving away from pictorial space. Throughout history, artists’ ways of seeing and rendering have shaped and were shaped by the ideology and rhetoric around land. Video artist Hito Steyerl’s essay In Freefall links the emergence of linear perspective in Renaissance European painting with the concurrent development of navigational tools that relied on an artificial fixed horizon and the ideology of the objective observer in the immediate years before European colonization of the Americas. Close to home, painters grouped into the Hudson River School worked to portray upstate New York as a new Eden, and Cornell’s Professor Kelly Presudi’s book Land Into Landscape documents how the French monarchy commissioned painters to create a new genre of landscape that recast forests as a distinct biome ready for logging rather than impenetrable folkloric woods.

Mulligan mentions turn-of-the-20th-century artists Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham as inspirations for her move from hyperrealistic drawings toward flat and decorative composition. It’s worth considering their common antecedent, William Morris, in relation to the scope of Mulligan’s work. For Morris, the designer, illustrator, novelist, and eventual founder of the UK Socialist League, the move away from illusionistic space was part of a social and political project. His iconic floral and animal wallpaper patterns drew from medieval manuscripts, textiles, and celtic interlace out of nostalgia for land-based lifeways. By intention, these required a team of skilled artisans to produce using woodblock prints and plant-based dye in opposition to the dehumanizing and polluting conditions of factory labor.

In Mulligan’s large color pieces, her flattened decorative style offers a way to see the abundance of interconnected life by collapsing the distinction between figure and ground. Salamanders intertwine with ferns, and a wolf ‘s fur whorls into wildflower petals. Without the compositional hierarchy of subject and setting, the exuberance of Cicero Swamp blankets the picture plane and feels louder and more kinetic than the birdsong in the gallery.

Mulligan laughs when I bring up Audobon. His Birds of America casts a shadow over the field of wildlife illustration. She acknowledges his influence along with opposition to the violence of his methods. Audobon shot his specimens to stage and paint. Beyond their mannered curves and poses, Audobon’s sharp focus on birds as subjects set against a receding or absent background renders a second death in their severance from the tapestry of living systems. “…in looking at his work, there’s this sort of past-ness, just the birds were obviously not living anymore. There’s this concreteness in his work that I don’t respond to.”

No Man’s Land instead is a response to the urgency Mulligan feels in the era of rapid climate change and the shock of watching an ecosystem disappear. “I think as artists we’re often drawn to this desire to preserve things,” she says of her approach, “I don’t want it to be preserving in a way that’s purely memorial.”

No Man’s Land: Reimagining the Myth of Cicero Swamp will be on view at ArtRage Gallery until October 24th.

ArtRage Gallery will host a panel discussion on Oct. 21st at 6 p.m. to explore Micron’s environmental and economic impacts on Syracuse & Central New York.

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Patrick McGuan is a columnist with Central Current covering the visual art ecosystem in Central New York. Originally from the midwest, they earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago...