Early spring of 2025 was when I received the news of my invitation to be an artist-in-residence with Friends of Pando. Pictured here is a photo I took of a wall from Red Rock Canyon’s visitor center in Nevada, around the same week that I received news of my upcoming artist residency. Red Rock Canyon is 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.”

I felt that it was a sign of what the upcoming 1-year residency was going to be like: that it was going to be a year-long journey of reflection, observation, research, studio work -all about finding how Pando is connected to this very place where I took this photo, to the other places past and future, near and far, how Pando is connected to me, to us a a society and the rest of the word.

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