When installed, the subtle glimmer of glass beads and gold foil in sunlight captured some of Pando’s enigmatic shimmering as wind caught its silvery leaves, and the overlay’s placement in a window meant its appearance changed dramatically throughout the day, casting shadows onto the topography behind.

Despite being a first attempt at introducing this new material and technique into my practice, I fell in love with both the process and outcome of the embroidered map. Like ceramic, textiles are deeply tactile, inviting touch and interaction from the viewer in ways that formal sculpture typically does not. I considered the way that both mediums have historically been viewed as separate from art – downgraded to “craft,” or more tellingly, to “women’s work.” Looking again to Lucy Lippard and Undermining, I leaned into this embrace of historically feminine materials and processes. Lippard writes, “Women identify with ‘nature,’ not because of ‘essentialism,’ but because we share with nature the dominant culture’s attempts at control.” My use of material – subject to the slumping and cracking of kiln temperatures or the flutter of a breeze – makes peace with the uncertainty and lack of control we expect when fully present in nature.

For the same exhibition, titled Biomineral Topographies, I also included three additional sculptures – Inoculated Landscapes – that wove together ceramic topographies with organic components. Unlike the Trembling Giant installation, my intent with these sculptures was to use the language of maps to tell a more general story about ways that plants like Pando might interact with the tectonics of their geology. Also starting with ceramic topographies, these sculptures weren’t based on any real-life maps – instead taking a note from the first topographic map ever drawn – Marcellin Du Carla’s Hypothetical Map from 1782.

Rather than weave these sculptures with fiber, I wanted to create a material relationship that could be seen growing and changing in real time – as if we were capable of experiencing Pando’s bio-mineral relationship from day-to-day rather than decade-to-decade or century-to-century. To do this, I built my topographies in such a way that they could be planted with living mycelium and coaxed, over the course of the six-week exhibition, into growing live, edible oyster mushrooms.

In essence, the process for starting new mushroom growth is much like the process for planting garden perennials – once the roots have matured (or in mushroom terms – “mycelium” has “inoculated” its container), the “plants” or mushrooms above the surface will continuously sprout, bloom, and die in cycles. Through this metaphor of mushroom inoculation, I hoped to show how Pando, too has spread dramatically, fully saturating or “inoculating” its 106-acre landscape and establishing such dominance that it does not need to struggle to survive and continuously send up new shoots across its vast environment.

“Inoculation” is a funny term. In daily parlance, we associate inoculation with vaccination – or an antibody’s ability to develop throughout our bodies enough that it naturally outcompetes a particular virus. Understanding the term through mushroom cultivation, the meaning is similar but perhaps more relatable, both to ourselves and to other organisms like Pando. When growing mushrooms at home or in a lab, you need two key ingredients: a nutrient-rich substrate like wood chips or compost, and “spawn” – any material that has healthy mycelium (mushroom roots) already growing on it. Within a few weeks of mixing the spawn and the substrate, the fungus’s mycelium will “inoculate” its container, eventually becoming so dominant that it guarantees its own survival against predators and starts the process of making mushrooms aboveground.

Nurturing the mycelium in my sculptures, I began thinking more deeply about how this “inoculation” process might be a better word for Pando’s growth across its landscape than the more fraught term “colonization.” Through inoculation, the organism establishing itself in a particular landscape does so in a way that is symbiotic rather than domineering. If vaccines were to deploy antibodies that colonized our bodies, rather than inoculating them, they would wreak havoc – probably killing us. Mushrooms, too, rely on the health of other organisms in their underground ecosystem – so much so that they often pass water and nutrients along to plant species as much as they benefit from munching on the decayed matter present in the soil.

This seemingly slight difference in terminology reminded me of the classic in environmental non-fiction, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, where he too sought to understand a place in all its complexities over time, and use that web of complexity as a model – or map – for human action. In his forward, Leopold wrote that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us” rather than “a community to which we belong.” I wondered what lessons we might learn from exceptionally resilient inoculators like Pando on living in community with our environment, and how understanding the difference between colonization and inoculation might make us better stewards of this tree – and our environments in general – for thousands more years to come.

While my residency comes to an official end in June 2024, my work will continue to map new ways of living in resonance with the natural world in all its uncertainty. As I worked towards this year’s exhibition deadline and the workshops and events that surrounded it, I put other, larger projects on hold – projects that I’m excited to shift focus towards as I continue to explore the mysteries of Pando and other enigmatic natural places.

Working with Friends of Pando over the past year has opened my mind to new modes of inquiry and built my confidence in bridging that sometimes vast chasm between arts and sciences. The culture of stewardship and inquiry that they’ve fostered around the tree makes it possible for artists like me to not just see across that divide, but to cross it. Thank you to Lance and everyone at Friends of Pando for your mentorship, trust, and many many hours of time over the past year. That’s a gift that, like Pando, keeps on spreading.