Can you start by giving us an overview of your practice, the inspiration behind it, and what led you to explore the intersection of environmental care and embodiment awareness? 

I often like to cite the statistic that less than half of the cells that make up your body—about 43%— are “human” cells. The majority of cells in your body are bacterial, viral, and fungal. Billions of prokaryotic organisms called archaea populate your gut and metabolize the nutrients that keep you alive, viral genomes are woven into your DNA, and commensal microbes coat your skin and converse with your immune system. You are teeming with life, and your body is home to more life than just your own. Without them, you would not survive—and without you, neither would they.

Like many, I was raised on sin doctrine and the pursuit of purity. In this mythology, to be belly-to-the-earth was the very form of Sin and temptation. The purpose of my human existence was to purify my physical and spiritual body of my inherently sinful nature and the desires of my flesh—even hunger; to distance myself as fully as possible from my nature so that I might pass the test and earn the highest honor of ascending up and out of my body and the earth itself. After being cast out from the garden of my own body, it was birthing and motherhood—pinnacles of creativity in their own rites—that were my resurrection and return to wholeness, and were my initiation into an exploration of body-based wisdom and spirituality. 

I describe my practice and my art as “eco-sensual.” I have a background in English Literature and linguistics so I have a deep interest in language and how we use it; these feed deeply into my artistic sensibilities. Eco comes from the Greek oikos meaning “home,” and sensual means “of the body and its senses.” To me, eco-sensual is “to be at home experiencing the world through our bodies.” It is an embodied sense of belonging to the places we reside and its community of life, both inside the ecosystems of our own bodies and in the wider world.

In your artist's statement, you mentioned your approach to watercolor and floral collage as co-creative endeavours with natural elements. How do you navigate the inherent impossibility of perfection and replication in your art, and what insights do you gain from working in concert with these natural elements?

I’m a self-taught artist, so all of my learning has been in experimental concert with the mediums I explore. As I venture deeper into fine arts spaces, I often hear professional artists lament working with watercolor because it truly affords very little control. It’s not straightforward at all. There’s a relationship between the water and everything it touches, and it can sometimes feel like it has different moods. It’s a lot like becoming intimate friends with someone—you learn their quirks and their ticks, what they like and what they don’t like, who they get along with and who they don’t. The watercolor soaks uniquely into different kinds of paper, dries particularly in different temperatures and environments, and reacts to different additives. A technique I love is sprinkling coarse salt onto damp watercolor—the salt crystals drink up the wet pigment leaving behind tiny snowflake patterns in the pigment that look like sparkling lights. These are details I could never replicate myself with a tiny brush, and it’s not a skill I perfect with practice. It is a predictable relationship that I observe between two mediums, and I invite them to interact in order to enhance my artwork. They are my collaborators. With floral collage, I’m creating art using dried and pressed florals, so my role is merely arranging. The beauty of the florals, the stems, and the leaves are all things I couldn’t replicate with my own hands if I tried. They’re works of art in their own right that I can’t take credit for, I am merely arranging their relationship to one another. (Gathering and pressing my own florals extends the co-creative process outward even further: as I traipse through a patch of wildflowers to pick them, my footsteps spread seeds, strengthen roots, and stimulate mycelium underground. My presence there perpetuates the cycle.)

To see art not as a product, but as a series of entangled relationships—sometimes even messy ones—leaves almost no room for “perfection” at all. What even is a “perfect” relationship? I like to say that sometimes my philosophy influences my art, and sometimes my art influences my philosophy. It calls to mind one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, and her beloved poem Wild Geese, in which she says “You do not have to be good./…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.”  Because my mediums are such that I cannot exert control over them, my art rejects constricting and hyper-individualistic ideals like perfection and purity. And by making art in collaborative relationships with natural elements, the art itself then echoes our place “in the family of things.”

You mentioned the relationship with natural elements as "power-with" instead of "power-over." Could you elaborate on this concept and how it shapes your artistic process and perspective on humanity's interdependence with nature?

There is a heavy emphasis on “mastery” in the fine art world. I don’t desire to have control over my materials so much as I desire to create circumstances where their innate beauty and my unique ideas co-exist. I can’t control the way two watercolor pigments swirl when they touch, I can only create the circumstances and then allow them to interact. Much like planting a garden or hanging a bird house. It’s an invitation. In my garden, “power-over” looks like pesticides to kill any pests, and wire to keep the birds and and wildlife out. “Power-with” looks like introducing ladybugs to eat the aphids, and planting marigolds to deter the squash bugs. It looks like leaving some plantings to grow uncovered so wildlife can nourish themselves. Diné historical ecologist Lyla June expounds on this in her TedTalk 3000-Year-Old Solutions to Modern Problems. In it, June directly contradicts the long-held belief that when colonists arrived on Turtle Island, the land was untouched wilderness—something full of passive potential to be tamed and owned by men. In truth, indigenous people were “active agents in shaping the land to produce prolific abundance…for the benefit of all life.” Humans were a “keystone species” upon which entire ecosystems depended. The land was not untouched wilderness, it was an intricate garden tended over millennia utilizing indigenous land management techniques that allowed them to cultivate the same landscapes for thousands of years without depleting the soil. They created what June calls “non-human-centric systems” that did not hoard for a single species, but instead seeded the bottom up to benefit all life around them, leading to incredibly sustainable food security. Conversely, we have seen how destructive human-centric practices like deforestation, mono-crop agriculture, corporate real estate, and resource extraction have ravaged the land. This leads some to the conclusion that the earth would be better off without humans, that “untouched wilderness” is morally good, and “human society” is morally bad—we should just leave everything alone and not interfere. As empathetic as it may seem, this is a pendulum swing in the opposite and equally self-centered. Humans BELONG to the earth. My art is a practice of embodying that sentiment and committing to it at the smallest level with my own hands.

You incorporate multi-narrative elements from mythology, ethnobotany, and mycology into your work. How do these diverse influences contribute to the celebration of decay and the vitality of interconnected ecosystems in your art?

As you can tell, I’m inspired by a lot of writers, poets, and scientists who are essential to my diverse artistic ecosystem. Much like an ecosystem, I think our myths, stories, and sciences are not intended to be immaculately preserved or for one pure, pristine version to remain unchanged in perpetuity. They are meant to meet us in the moment; they should change and shape-shift and evolve into nourishing navigation tools. Like mycelium, they break things down and disperse among a whole host of intricately-connected organisms. When we allow our stories and our symbolism to break down into digestible parts—to see the insides of them—new meaning is acquired and new life thrives on them. Much like the fallen tree in the forest that becomes the nurse log, through my work, I have felled old theologies and mythologies and symbols to decay into something nourishing and life-giving, supported and sustained in an entangled web of writers and scientists and artists who are building from the sacred rot. More than just observing, maintaining, and celebrating ecosystems, I want to be able to think in ecosystems.

Can you tell us about your submitted work, Exultation?

Exultation is ultimately a celebration of freedom in humility. There is so much to celebrate when we drop our pretenses about our own superiority or importance on this planet and revel in the sheer wonderment of being alive. Not just alive and existing, but multitudinously alive—alive as many organisms in concert as one; alive as an ecosystem. It’s often said that Nihilism and Absurdism both agree that life is inherently meaningless, but the Nihilist says “life is has no meaning, so none of this matters,” but the Absurdist says “life has no meaning, so let’s make as much as we can ourselves!” There’s a certain level of ennui that accompanies de-centering humans and realizing perhaps we aren’t exceptional. Exultation seems to shout, arms raised: “But look what I’m made of! What an absolute miracle that I exist!”

Your work aims to foster the sense of interconnection and entanglement required for radical, collective environmental justice. Could you share how your art contributes to this mission and inspires action to preserve ecosystems and indigenous knowledge?

I’ve alluded to and cited several of my interconnected and entangled inspirations and how these writers, scientists, and environmental activists have influenced my work (in fact I recently got a text from my art framer who looked at my work and asked “have you been reading Braiding Sweetgrass?” which confirmed for me that my influences and references are indeed being translated and received). The emerging, overarching themes are of belonging—allowing our perceived senses of individualism to dissolve and decay, shedding expectations for power or perfection. Without these, I don’t believe we can adequately or effectively engage in truly restorative ecological justice.  We need the humility to understand how very delicately we are tethered to life on our planet in order to scrutinize and deconstruct the systems contributing to ecocide, biodiversity decline, and climate collapse. We also need the deeply-felt sense of belonging that makes the ecological feel personal, comforts us as we acknowledge hard truths, and motivates us to contribute, knowing that history proves we humans have been a keystone species in our ecologies and we can be again.  My intent and my hope is that my art makes all of this feel personal and possible.

Your experience spans exhibiting, writing, collaborating, and teaching. How have these diverse experiences enriched your artistic journey and contributed to the evolution of your narrative style and message?

I have an intense desire for deep connection. I love to learn, I love to share what I’ve learned, I love to ask questions and talk for hours, and I love to write. It’s no surprise that this can feel like “a lot” for people. Metabolizing my knowledge and my personal philosophies into artwork allows me to transmute pages of writing and hours of words into something beautiful that ignites curiosity and knowing in others without saying a word. As my work and my skillsets evolve, I’m able to “say” more. Each facet of my work feeds into this desire for connection. In mycological terms, I want to myceliate through my work. Mycelium—the intricate threadlike web of underground fibers that produce mushrooms and form resource networks among numerous species—are made up of a chainlink of cells called hyphae. Something fascinating about these structures is that they are able to solve complex navigation puzzles (Google “slime molds and road maps”) because the hyphae branch in many directions at once, and can communicate with all the other cells in the structure instantaneously. Some of these structures can be miles wide. Whether I’m writing an article, meeting people at an art show, teaching a watercolor class at the local library, or working on projects with other eco-artist, it nourishes and feeds into the whole mycelial network of my artistic offerings and my life. I suppose many people would call this purpose.

Could you provide additional insight into the artwork 'Nurse Log and the Network'? What is the overarching narrative or story conveyed through this piece?

This piece was conceived after reading two books which I’m sure either are or will be beloved to readers of this interview series: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. The title references fallen trees that in their decay invite a symphony of species of fungi, insects, invertebrates, animals and plants to spring to life, often referred to as “nurse logs.”  I am always curious when people look at this piece whether they first see the figure of the person first and then see the individual plants and mushrooms that make it up, or whether they see the details first and then the figure emerges. It asks “are we a part of nature, or is nature a part of us?” I think the directionality of both lines of question have valuable insights. It also asks “is this a painting of a person made of nature, or is this a painting of nature and I see a person simply because it’s in my nature to recognize my own likeness?”  In his famous series “The Treachery of Images,” Belgian surrealist Magritte created a realistic painting of a pipe and entitled it Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “this is not a pipe.” It evokes questions about art, language, and reality—in one sense it’s correct, the painting is not a pipe. But in another sense, the title is incorrect because the image depicted is indeed a pipe. Who are we to say what something is based solely on what we can observe with our eyes? In what ways does language disallow us to make important distinctions of our realities? 

In the same way, Nurse Log & The Network is intended to encourage us to see ourselves “in” nature and to identify “as” nature, as well to scrutinize ourselves in the process. When we see ourselves as intimately interconnected with nature, we are more inclined to value it, care for it, and protect it. However, when we anthropomorphize nature, we often inadvertently project human characteristics, morals, and politics onto other species. These human-centric narratives can sometimes muddle the conversation. When we discuss the complex underground mycelial networks that distribute nutrients and resources among many species across vast forest landscapes, we can see the human narrative of collaboration and mutuality play out, but this does not make the trees “communists.”  Likewise, the language we use to describe parasitic relationships in nature leaks into our social and political language as well; suddenly those who have what I call “capitalistically inconvenient needs” are labeled as “parasites” by some. (Interestingly, the etymology of parasite simply means “to eat from another’s table,” which is a collectively positive experience of social bonding.)

In her essay Becoming Supracellular, ecofeminist writer Sophie Strand writes, “If a cursory study of somatic shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my calls. Let my river run both ways.” Nurse Log & The Network is an invitation to let the river run both ways in how we experience both a separateness and an entanglement with our ecological Selves.

Do you believe that engaging in artistic expression is a mode of nurturing? If so, what are the reasons behind this perspective?

The definition of nurture includes “caring for” and “encouraging the growth” of the things we’re nurturing. I think that everyone has an internal knowing and an awareness we may not know how to put into words—we just know it when we see it. When we hear a song, or read a book, or see a piece of art that feels like someone else has put an intimate part of ourselves into an experiential form, we recognize ourselves in it and are simultaneously rescued from our isolation and gathered into nurturing arms of understanding. To build a trellis beside my passionflowers is to “encourage them to grow” upward, though it is their own work to climb and their own cellular intelligence that enables them to do so. To create art is to build a trellis beside our kin.

What message or call to action would you like to leave our readers with?

You are right on time. You cannot be late to an unfolding. You belong here and you are needed here. My personal call to action every day comes from Mary Oliver’s poem Instructions for Living a Life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Tend to the ease of your amazement. For every fascination and delight you experience there is an accompanying avenue for expansion, whether it’s improving access to it for other people, protecting the spaces where it exists, diversifying and nurturing it, or committing to learning more about it. Let those threads of curiosity and astonishment myceliate into purpose.

Find more about the artist here.

Cover image:

Fruiting Body by Chloe Parsons. Image courtesy of Chloe Parsons.