“How Does Your Garden?” is a series of drawings inspired by my reading of Camille Dungy’s book Soil. Dungy inspired me to think about gardens - our relationship to place when we plant and nurture, what it means to be rooted, and ways that we can collaborate with nature and with each other. I was sitting in my garden feeling despair about the future – ecological, political, and personal – when I noticed a breeze catching up petals of the columbine, making the blooms dance on their delicate stems. Struck by the beauty and lightness of the moment I promised myself to focus more on moments like these, to make drawings that will be reminders of blooming even when the sky is gray and the plants seem dead. I began to sketch in my garden and to include little pieces of the sketches, the artistic “seeds”, in my larger drawings.
As companion pieces to the drawings of blooming I include drawings of leavings. These ink and charcoal drawings take my attempts to collaborate with nature a step further, from my subject matter to my art-making process. In the fall of 2023 I began playing with making my own inks using everything from invasive tamarisk to gleanings from my compost bin. I am still experimenting, hoping to expand my homemade color palate, but I am appreciating that my shift towards foraged paints and inks leads me to literally connect with the land around me before beginning each new project. I can only begin where I am, and only begin because I have hope. I don’t think it was coincidence that I ran across a poem by Kyle Tran Myhre in which he writes, “Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.”
