Studio Notes
In the summer of 2026, I worked as an Artist-in-Residence at Ragdale, just north of Chicago. Ragdale hosts extensive native gardens and borders the 50-acre Shaw Prairie, a unique remnant prairie that hosts tremendous biodiversity.
It was the height of summer, with everything abuzz. While there, I read Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World, an epic take on the history of the natural sciences.
The connections Humboldt found in his work across the globe echoed in the dozens of acres I explored. The more time I spent in the gardens and prairie grounds at Ragdale, the more I understood how sun-driven this place, and all of earth, is.
Flowers turned throughout the summer days to greet the sun, colors vibrated within each plant and bounced off neighboring plants to stand out, and everything glowed twice as much at sunset, collecting the last dances of the day and its creatures.
The Heliophile series is a tribute to earth-based phenomena, of their liveliness, their resilience, and their beauty.
With special thanks to Jessica Sladek and her intrepid team of plant caretakers at Ragdale.
“...Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own. ‘In this great chain of causes and effects’, Humboldt said, ‘no single fact can be considered in isolation.’ With this insight, he invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.” ”
