Format: ORAL

Andrew L Hipp1,2, Rachel D Davis3

1 Center for Tree Science and Herbarium, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois, USA 2 Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA 3 Independent Artist, artbumble.com, Downers Grove, Illinois, USA

The authors of this talk have been collaborating formally as artist (RD) and writer (AH) for more than 20 years. We have published a book and several illustrated natural essays together, and we have a book in press. We are currently working on a series of paintings and essays based on the lakes of Northern Wisconsin, supported by a multiyear residency through the Drawing Water Program at UW Madisons Trout Lake Station. We collaborate at the interface between art, literature, science, and natural history. Our work is in part documentary: we take great pleasure in seeing and recording what the natural world presents us, then sharing it in our own ways. We each see an organism from a different angle, see something the other could not have. The collaboration moves beyond documenting and telling about, however. It also informs our individual work in art, education, and science. For Andrew, writing mediates between subjects of inquiry in the field and herbariuma weevil escaping from an acorn, an early-emerging false rue anemoneand the processes that connect individual organisms. Sentences convey information, but they also give form to understanding. The writing is the thinking, not simply an account of thoughts. For Rachel, photographing plants, fungi and insects is a first step to discovering the formal in the natural. Painting, drawing, natural dyes, and printmaking are ways to distill the shapes of plants, the light reflected off the water, mosses seen through a magnifying lens, and lichens into patterns. The rearrangement of shapes from the landscape with colors found in nature engages and feeds her as an artist. Our talk will illustrate how this collaboration both reveals and exists in parallel with the natural world, while presenting our understanding of how integrating art, science, and natural history has changed our respective practices.