Katrina Bello
Multi-Disciplinary Artist
2025-2025 National Artist in Residence
..........................Expansion..........................
As the introduction for my essay about my experience as an artist-in-residence with Friends of Pando, I wanted to start with these two photos that I felt represented scenes that best describe the year-long residency of journeying, making observations, reflections, readings and making artwork to honor the extraordinary organism that is known as Pando. The 1st photo was taken from the visitor center of Red Rock Canyon National Preserve in southern Nevada, a nature preserve that consists of almost 200,000 acres of the Mojave Desert that is filled with a mixture of desert dwelling wildlife, plant life and geologic features. I took this photo of the wall because it had the quote attributed to the Scottish-born American naturalist and author John Muir: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” When I tried to look up when Muir wrote it, I found that it is a paraphrasing of his original quote that was taken from his 1911 book “My First Summer in the Sierra,” which goes:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself in nature, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
The time the photo was taken and finding the original quote felt serendipitous because it was also around the same time that I received the news of my invitation to be a 2025-2026 artist-in-residence with Friends of Pando. The news of the residency and encountering the quote felt like they were signs that the residency will be a special journey: that it will be one of research, reflection, recordings and finding connections between Pando and us humans, each other, the world we live in, and even to the universe beyond our planet.
The notion of connection brings us to the 2nd photo which I took on my very first visit to Pando during the late winter of 2025. It was a very silent time in Fishlake National Forest, when snow was still on the ground, the lake was still frozen, many animals were still hibernating or haven’t returned from the places they migrated to, and Pando was still dormant (or so I thought). That early March day I visited was very sunny and windy, and it gave me a chance to see Pando up close and walk along, beside and around Pando’s several clones of different ages, heights, and all swaying with the mid afternoon breeze – clonal trunks, branches and the twigs bare of the leaves well known for the sound made from their rustling. But despite Pando being bare of leaves, sound was still being emitted from the rustling of twigs (which I made note of). In the cloudless blue sky, I felt struck by the bright light color of Pando’s trunks, and while I was walking, I was reflecting on one of the facts I read about Quaking Aspen trunks which I thought was quite marvelous: that the tree bark can photosynthesize, which is a unique ability that Aspens have evolved as a survival mechanism. That the powdery white surfaces of Pando’s bark is actively producing energy in this dead of winter while other trees are inactive was a source of wonder. Recently I had also come across texts on scientists who are doing tests to determine if plants possess consciousness in the manner that we humans understand it, and so that led me to wonder if Pando was somehow having an “awareness” of my presence on that afternoon. And so with all those thoughts going through my mind, I stopped by one of Pando’s clones, removed the glove from my left hand, and placed my hand on the trunk of one of Pando’s clones. I remained still and silent.
“Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves…my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of the world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination, and integration.” ~ Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012
Touching Pando was establishing a connection, acknowledging, giving gratitude, and also asking for permission. The above quote from Pallasmaa’s book best articulated for me how this notion of touch ties together my intentions for connecting with Pando, my relationship to the landscapes that are referenced in the artwork I’ve been making (and will be making), and the processes involved in making my art. Not exactly knowing yet what I will learn about Pando during the upcoming year-long residency, and what form my residency project will be, I felt that I needed this still and silent moment to reflect on the upcoming year to work on this project – to be like a ceremony to launch the project. Touching became a gesture and establishment of a promise to put faith and trust in this connection with Pando.
Along with the idea of the interconnectedness of all things, not just with everything in the planet, but also to all things in the universe, touch presents the visceral possibilities to not only present what can be sensorially witnessed, but also the ones that are beyond the reach of our senses. Which is exactly what Pando exemplifies: a living, thriving, fellow creature we exist with in this world, who we can see and touch, but whose vast inner life, actions, movements, and abilities are far beyond the reach of our senses, and also whose timespan far exceeds human time. The incredible wonders that Pando is letting us know about resilience, longevity, and adaptability through the different changes in climate, geology and environmental conditions, these are all qualities that have no form that can be represented visually, but can only be appreciated by our minds. And therefore, as the months proceeded, and after several visits to Pando, I decided to make works that embody the unseen and immeasurable qualities that make Pando unique, complex and an important member of the natural world.
On the notion of touch, I wanted to start with drawings. For me it is my most touch-heavy medium. So much so that I consider each drawing I make carries the weight of my insistence on the subject and their content.
Touching, scraping, crushing, rubbing, spreading – these are processes that happen when I am making my drawings, particularly my large scale drawings. Pictured above is my mixing and crushing soft pastel pigments to match the colors on Pando and their surrounding landscape during my first trips to visit Pando which took place mostly in late winter and in the spring when things were still dormant. My hands are intimately involved in this process, and also my body since I count on my weight to press and rub the pigments on the surface of the paper, especially when I am making large drawings. The drawings are all made in my studio in New Jersey, far from Pando’s location. Therefore when I am preparing these pigments and sketches, I can only count on my memories, photos, videos and sound recordings I made while I was with Pando. With the photos, videos, and sound recordings, my memories of the sensory qualities of Pando and the surroundings are amplified: from the feel and texture of Pando’s smooth light colored bark, the darker bark at the base, the colors of the surrounding vegetation (particularly sagebrush and juniper), of the basalt rocks that characterize the terrain Pando is thriving on, of the multicolored lichen growing on the basalt, of the different cool hues of Fish Lake from its waters are frozen or liquid, sounds emitted when wind blows through Pando’s leaves and branches. And that’s not even counting what one can imagine from the myriads of minute and imperceptible forces that operate within and around Pando in a complex orchestra of biological, geologic, environmental and other Earthly forces that has been going on for eons.
As the months progressed and the more I visited Pando, the more it became a much larger project that included writing, photo series, videos, sound recordings that all gave me a sense that the residency was going to be a project that needed to go beyond my initial intention of making drawings as an outcome. That’s when I decided to give the title Expansion to the Pando residency project. The project became a journey into getting to know Pando through the senses, memory, descriptions by others, the sciences and the imagination.
In conclusion to my essay, I want to share some works series and videos, along with some documentation of the first large drawing I’m making for the Pando project. Additionally, I want to share a link to Expansion, a webpage that is devoted to my Pando project which will continue to grow. I am forever grateful to Friends of Pando for this opportunity that has forever changed me when it
Pando Prairie Pacific
This is the title of the first video project I made during the first few months of residency. The video is a triptych, and what it’s about is looking for relationships and interconnectedness between Pando and its location, with the sites of two previous other residencies that I recently spent time in: the Flint Hills in Kansas, and Pacific Ocean by the coast of Oregon. This was in early 2025 when I was also learning to make field recordings and understanding natural surroundings through sound. At the same time, I’m also working on an ongoing series of works in drawing, writing, video and sound that is about water, bodies of water and the genesis of water on Earth. In this video triptych, I was imagining the journey of water from its cosmic origins, through the many ancient vanished oceans, through continents, through eons, to finally form the special and distinct alpine terrain defining this area of Fish Lake National Forest – a distinction that allowed for Pando to take root, spread and thrive through several millenia.
Hold the Ghost of Their Breathing
Click images for enlarged view
“Holding the Ghost of Thier Breathing” is the title of these seven drawings pictured here. The works are soft pastel rubbings of Pando’s leaves that I collected in the Fall of 2025. The number of works refer to the Seven Sisters (Pleiades star cluster) that was visible in the night skies during my visits to Pando, which is pictured here in the night photo. The “breathing” in the title comes from my ongoing fascination with the quote when it comes to the importance of forests: how forests are the “lungs of the Earth.”
7 Pastels from "Holding the Ghost of their Breathing"
Click images for enlarged view
TMG (thigmomorphogenesis)
There were several sessions of sound recordings that I did during the course of my several visits to Pando. In addition to recording the sounds within Pando, I was also recording Pando’s surroundings, particularly Fish Lake, stressing on the significance of the surroundings such as water, soil and climate in Pando’s thriving. While still contemplating on how the sound recordings will be part of my Pando project, one of the books I was reading was Peter Wohlleben’s 2021 book “The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature.” One of the studies he mentioned in the book that struck me was how trees possess what is similar to a heartbeat: a slow rhythmic pulse every several hours that is based on a tree’s contractions to pump water upwards to the rest of a tree. I found the notion so moving and how this scientific study provided even stronger evidence of human connection to trees. The notion made me imagine this slow pulse that has been going on for over thousands of years, and a pulse so vast that it covers a large area of land. The scales of time and ability that are all embodied with Pando were qualities I felt were so incredible. And so the outcome from this reflection is this video where I slowed down my prism-filtered videos of Pando and included my sound recordings of two human heartbeats. The title of the work “TMG” is the scientific abbreviation for thigmomorphogenesis, the phenomenon that plants alter their growth in response to touch.
Large Drawings (In progress)
And so with all the works that I’ve been making throughout the year- the videos, sound recordings, journal writing, and small drawings- and along with memories of being around Pando and surroundings where Pando thrives, my understanding and appreciation for Pando grew, along with concern for their future and the future of their surroundings. Because I believe that all things are connected, Pando’s thriving is all connected to us and everything. In reflecting and pondering all these, what is produced is a scaled up set of understanding, imagination, feelings and sentiments for Pando. And so I wanted to make a large drawing that can embody all these in scale, size, in a multitude of highly detailed marks and gestures, in tone, and most especially time. Because Pando has been resilient through thousands of years, I wanted to honor this through making a works that takes a significant amount of time to make- time occupied with the act of drawing and thinking about Pando. Because Pando is extraordinary in mass and size, I wanted those reflected in a scale of work that is the same, one that can envelope the viewer, just as Pando envelopes us when we walk through their many clones. In that enveloping, I imagine Pando’s thousands of branches, twigs and leaves embracing us, and so I wanted that reflected in the the multitude of marks and strokes of charcoal and pastel lines on paper, in a scale where the viewer feels surrounded and embraced by these many marks. All in all I wanted a large work that embodies the scale of Pando’s extraordinary qualities, and also the scale of the urgent need to protect Pando.
And so the outcome of this is this yet to be titled drawing that is in progress. It is drawn with charcoal and soft pastel, around 5 x 9 feet in size, and referring to a photo I took from upper Pando in March 2026. Surrounding the drawing are my scratch papers where I mix my crushed pigments made with a mixture of charcoal and soft pastels.
Expanding...
This year-long residency with Friends of Pando has been a journey of thinking, reflecting, realizing, discovering, observing, wandering, wondering about, and experiencing Pando. The more I did these activities- alongside the multidisciplinary studio works I was doing for the residency- the more I realized that for me, this will be growing and ongoing journey. In continuation of this journey, I have launched the Expansion Project, now live via my website. In this project, I will share more artwork I’ll be making, share updates about my visits and experiences with Pando through the different seasons, and to share more reflections, and share how understanding and appreciating Pando is also a way of understanding our relationship to our natural surroundings, and also to each other.
Artist Statement
The works I make in drawing emerge from my reflections and observations of our complex relationship with the natural world we live in. I see this relationship as my point of departure in understanding our humanity: what we cherish, long for, strive for, dream of, what we fear and makes us vulnerable. Trees and imagery based on trees are a constant reference in my work because they stand for resilience, patience, and for their life-giving and sustaining qualities as our fellow sentient creatures we share this world with. Additionally, as an immigrant artist who is trying to find my place in this new country I now call my home, trees stand for rootedness- this being held in place physically by being fully engaged with the earth. Therefore, making work about Pando is not just a chance to explore and celebrate its remarkable and unique wonder; it is also an opportunity to reflect on the qualities that Pando reminds us of ourselves and our relationships with one another: about survival, adaptability, unity, coexistence, empathy and finding balance. Making drawings about these observations and reflections is a way of honoring Pando, of expressing what makes Pando complex, and to hopefully raise awareness of its vulnerability so that eventually the works will promote care for its survival and thriving for our future generations.
The ideas that I intend to explore for my drawings about Pando will be an intertwining of narratives in geology, botany, environmental sciences and natural history. My primary resource of information that I intend to explore fully will be the extensive data collected by Friends of Pando. I’m particularly interested in the geological transformation of the region of Utah that Pando inhabits, and what aspects could it have provided for such a unique organism to emerge and flourish. Additionally I also want to delve into personal histories, collective histories and poetic representations to get a sense of the variety of sentiments that different groups of people think and feel about Pando. Additionally, I also intend to keep an open mind through the year-long residency, and welcome new ideas and resources that will inform and enrich my project further.
To make work about Pando is such an honor. I intend to utilize the residency to expand my ongoing series of large and small drawings that are about trees, particularly the large drawings, which are my way of engaging the viewer with the subject of the work through size and scale. The year-long opportunity to visit Pando to observe, watch, listen, reflect, take photos, videos and sound recordings is a precious gift of time and access to get to know the forest. In the same spirit, I also consider the drawings that will be the outcome of this residency as also a gift that I hope to be able to share with the community though a form of a public engagement event.
Bio
Born in the Philippines, Katrina Bello is a visual artist whose work is informed by reflections and experiences of natural environments encountered during the course of migration. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries, universities and colleges in the United States and the Philippines, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies in the United States. She has participated in exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ; the Visual Arts Center of NJ in Summit, NJ; El Museo Cultural in Santa Fe, NM; MO Space and West Gallery in Metro Manila, Philippines. She has been awarded residencies at Tusen Takk Foundation in Leland, MI; The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM; The Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Otis, OR; Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY; Tides Institute & Museum of Art in Eastport, ME; Art & History Museums in Maitland, FL. In 2024, she was a Creative Fellow by the Mid Atlantic Arts, and was a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. This year, she concluded a solo exhibition at the Dennos Museum in Traverse City, Michigan, presented by Tusen Takk Foundation. Katrina attended the College of Fine Arts in Diliman, Quezon City in the Philippines, and received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University. She received a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She lives and works in New Jersey and Nevada in the United States, and Metro Manila in the Philippines.
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