My time at the Tallgrass Prairie artist residency sharpened this attention. Working within one of the continent’s most endangered and intricate ecosystems taught me to think in deep time and to read a landscape as a dense web of interdependence. Daily contact with its plant and animal life reframed connection itself, not as sentiment, but as belonging to a shared, more-than-human world.

This thinking draws me to Pando, which refuses the scale at which I usually understand a life. It is something that exceeds a single body, lifespan, or point of view. I am especially interested in how other life interacts with it: the understory of plants and animals that live within and upon it, and the people walk through it, name it, and protect it. Pando is a world as much as a being, shaped by these relationships as much as by its own growth. To draw it is to reckon with non-human agency, to treat Pando not as a subject I compose but as a living agent on terms indifferent to mine. I don’t intend to be the sole author of these drawings so much as a collaborator with, and witness to, a being whose story was underway long before me and will continue after.

I intend for my drawings to remain both narrative vessels and records of process, and I position myself as participant and storyteller, an intimate, partial hand among other agencies, drawing connections between the cycles of the living world, the limits of my own perspective, and the possibility of renewal through attention.