While the Forest Sleeps

In the winter of 2026, I was artist in residence at the North Carolina Arboretum, nestled in the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Asheville — formal gardens, woodland trails, and mountain views that most people see in bloom. I arrived in the cold and the bare.

My task was to respond to the forest in winter. What I found was that dormancy is not emptiness. A bud on a branch. A small patch of holly caught in waning sun. Bubbles trapped under the ice of the koi pond. Tiny moments that reward the kind of attention most people save for grander things.

The grandeur was there too — mountains outlined by spiny bare trees along the ridge. But I kept returning to the small and the hidden.

The work uses photographs printed on silk organza, framed in tobacco sticks and found wood — material that carries its own memory of land and labor, brought into conversation with this place I’ve come to love.

There is one detail I return to. The tobacco sticks and wire are salvaged from my family’s farm in eastern North Carolina — the same farm where my father was born and raised and where I grew up. He used that wire-wrapped tobacco stick for his purposes on the land. I used it to frame beauty. We were working in tandem, across time. I find that I’m still not done thinking about that.