Amanda Triplett
Fabric Artist
2024-2025 Artist In Residence
Understories: A Residency with Pando
As an interdisciplinary textile artist living and practicing among the Douglas-fir forests of Portland, Oregon, my work explores the ways patterns of biology form iterative and interconnected networks. Years ago, I began incorporating recycled textiles into my art, not only to reduce my material footprint and divert resources from landfills, but also because I discovered the endless sculptural and tactile possibilities of textiles. My art practice is guided by curiosity and embodied through experimentation and play. Over time, my art practice has merged with and expanded into a nature practice. My nature practice asks me to be present in nature, remain curious, observe closely, and engage with a gentle playfulness.
It was with this sense of playfulness and curiosity that I began my residency with Friends of Pando in the early summer of 2024. I started online with me perusing the VR images, maps, and data sets available on the information rich Friends of Pando website. Based on the descriptions, stories, and data that I could find online, I began to summon a sketch of Pando in my mind’s eye. I was fascinated by the narrative of Pando as one of the world’s largest known living organisms, a single organism expressed as a whole forest.
In August of 2024, I started my journey to actually see Pando in person. Flying into the Las Vegas airport, I drove through the dramatic rock landscapes, immense mountain forms, and sweeping desert valleys of Southern Utah to reach Pando. One of the most striking things about Pando is its relationship to the surrounding landscape. In the midst of the severe desert and rocky environment, you ascend 9,000 feet and happen upon a bejeweled aspen forest teeming with an abundance and diversity of life. I was immediate struck by the way that Pando was a container of life, a living vessel holding extraordinary diversity in contrast to the deserts and canyons around it.
Of course, the surrounding deserts and canyons are full of hidden lifeforms as well, but there is something especially abundant, vibrant, and exuberant about this forest. I immediately found myself photographing and sketching the many plant species there. I found that the way that Pando where one organism shelters, hosts, and interacts with countless others. I was taken by the multiplicity of Pando, at once a single being and a forest, a tree and a network of many trees.
My work with nature begins with impressions and feelings. One of my first impressions of Pando was of the way the leaves glowed and sparkled in the sunlight. The shimmering quality of the leaves feels almost otherworldly, like the forest itself is exhaling light. Looking closer, I became fascinated by the diversity within the leaves: their shifting colors and intricate patterns. Some were various shades of green, others gold, and still others held surprising flecks of red.
When I returned home from Pando, I immediately began collecting and documenting the leaves of the Quaking Aspen that grows in my yard. The leaves are not from Pando but perhaps a very distant cousin? After taking photos of the leaves, I printed them onto fabric with an inkjet printer. Each leaf was then cut out and stitched and embroidered by hand. Through this process of making and stitching, I learned the shapes, forms, and patterns embedded in the aspen leaves
Curious about the pigments of Pando itself, I foraged fallen leaves for the purpose of creating a dye vat. To my delight, the leaves yielded a radiant yellow, which I used to dye cotton fabric. Using the fabrics, I created additional leaves and connecting pieces, layering them and connecting them into a larger piece.
This process became more than leaf documentation; it was an inquiry into diversity and abundance, into how each leaf is both singular and part of a greater whole. Just as Pando is one organism expressed through many trees, this project became a portrait of unity through multiplicity, a collection of individual leaves becoming a canopy.
A Shape of Pando
This piece began as an exploration of how one might create a portrait of Pando which is both a single tree and a vast forest. I was struck by the impossibility of containing such an immense living organism within a single frame. How do you capture something so large, so interconnected, and so layered in life?
One solution is an aerial view: a portrait taken from above, where the outline of Pando might emerge as a discernible shape. Yet I quickly realized that this perspective, while revealing, would also leave out so much: the unseen network of roots beneath the soil, the textured surfaces of the trunks, the shimmer of the canopy, and the inhabitants of its ecosystem. Despite the limitations and the fluctuations in the boundaries of Pando, the aerial perspective seemed like a good way to conjure an impression of Pando.
With this in mind, I began by looking at maps and aerial photographs of Pando, allowing these abstractions of its form to guide me. From these references, I constructed a fiber-based portrait of the grove, stitching its shape into being with recycled fabric, thread, and beads. Beads became like luminous nodes, points of light that suggested both leaves shimmering in the wind and the unseen connections running underground through its root system. Thread traced the delicate yet resilient pathways of connection, binding together the many into one.
Under the Story
There are endless things about Pando to fall in love with. I enjoyed how visible the layers of the ecosystem were to the naked eye. Layer upon layer, you can observe how life builds upon life. Lava rock peeks out of the forest floor embedded with a spectrum of lichens and mosses. Mushrooms spring up from leaves and rotted wood, which in turn decompose and create fertile ground for wildflowers, sagebrush, and juniper. This idea of the multi-layered forest made way for the lighted sculptural piece, Under the Story.
Aspen trunks are velvety soft, delicate, and powdery to the touch and are a major feature of this piece. That discovery felt deeply significant. To capture this quality, I began working with a vintage, transparent curtain fabric, its pale hue reminiscent of the quaking aspen bark. Layering lace and netting, I built up textures that suggested both the delicacy and the depth of the trunks. Their trunks, like their leaves, are capable of photosynthesis so the transparency of the trunk material led me into a path of playing with light in this piece.
Around the trunks, I started to build other forest components, stitching juniper bushes and big sagebrush and other plants to form the layers of understory and into the forest . My process with this piece centered around summoning the sensory abundance of Pando, the feast of textures, colors, and forms. I used red and brown textured fabrics to form lava rock that underlies the grove, a reminder of the land’s volcanic origins. Through this material exploration, I sought a visual language to express the forest’s richness. The piece is formed like a basket or container, referencing the way that Pando holds and nurtures connected life.
The canopy was formed from a combination of beads and fabric. The transparency and sparkle of light through the beads led me to know that this piece needed to be illuminated. So I set out to figure out how to wire this piece with light to illuminate the inside. The final piece glows from inside, the beaded leaves reflecting and sparkling with light.
About Resident Amanda Triplett
Artist Statement
Making art in the intersection of fine art and craftwork, I manipulate, layer, and stitch salvaged fibers into sculpture, performance, and installation works about humanity’s emotional relationships to ecological narratives.
Fascinated by the evidence of aging on salvaged textiles, I treat “deterioration” as a part of the creative process. I fold and guide the fabric into new forms, stitching it into place. Making becomes a mending practice, a way to transform familiar materials. The resulting biomorphic pieces utilize the tendency of fabric to organically crease and flow. The repetition and resonance of patterns in nature’s design guide the creation of the work, making visual connections between the larger phenomena of nature and our own human biological bodies.
I am fascinated by the way that Pando has found ways to grow, thrive, and endure conditions that would appear to be antithetical to life. As human wrought environmental conditions continue to manifest in greater magnitude and threaten our environment, I am interested in learning from the survival narratives of Pando. Using a scaffolding of science, mythology and imagination, I am committed to engaging in speculative exploration of the secrets of Pando’s success. Possible points of inquiry for me include the root structures, the supportive plant, fungal, and animal communities and the unique geological shifts and movement that have contributed to Pando’s survival.
Bio
Amanda Triplett is an intermedia artist and arts educator who practices, shows, and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Using primarily recycled textiles, Amanda creates craft-based, fiber sculpture, performance, and installation about human relationships to biological, ecological, and cultural narratives. Currently Amanda is making work around the narratives of ecological hope and resilience.
A recipient of numerous residencies, grants, and awards, Amanda has had the honor of working as an artist in residence at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR and the Mary Olson Farm in Auburn, WA. Amanda is a member of Shift Gallery in Seattle and practices and lives in Portland, Oregon with her family
Friends of Pando is dedicated and working to educate the public, support research and preservation efforts and inspire stewardship of Pando, the world’s largest tree.
Friends of Pando is a proud partner of Pando’s public land stewards, Fishlake National Forest of the U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture. Learn more about our partnership.
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Friends of Pando
PO Box 12
Richfield, UT, 84701
Phone: 435-633-1893
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