Written by Anne Beffel (she/they), 2026 Vicky Tzoumerka Knoedler Artist in Residence

When I teach, or work as a public artist with communities, I try to enter into currents and relationships already in place. At best, I make decisions in response. Even before I left home to serve as the Vicky Tzoumerka Knoedler Artist in Residence at Holy Wisdom Monastery, I understood the public art project I’d described in my application was merely a thought experiment. It was disconnected from Monastery communities. Connection could develop fully only in closer proximity with the land and its inhabitants.

As a kind of insurance against project uncertainty, I’d stuffed my car full of supplies: paints, cameras, utensils for making wild inks and Cyanotype paper for creating sun prints. I’d packed nearly everything but the kitchen sink.

Upon arrival I gravitated toward the beauty of the August controlled burn on the prairie transitioning to oak savanna. Signage there communicated years-long efforts, including refrain from herbicides. The intent of these land restoration practices was to create a prairie where plants such as leafy spurge would not overtake others. It appeared to have been a difficult decision to undertake a burn when so many plants were thriving. Clear and present were the care and thoughtful stewardship applied to complex, inter-related problems.

At the burn, I stepped off the cut path and knelt to the ground blackened with ash. When I lightly touched the dark filaments, their softness registered and then disappeared, so fragile they were that they collapsed instantly into a fine powder. As I rubbed the velvet ash between finger and thumb, the finest particles ground into the ridges of my skin and the largest drifted into my palm. I blew the powder from my hand in a puff. Only a shadow drawing remained, by chance a heart shape made of prairie lives and human care. A remnant of earth, wind, rain and fire.

As I followed lines of ash over uneven ground, I thought I was looking at traces of humans’ hands navigating drip burn torches around plants they believed could be spared. With permission, I picked a green leaf from the smallest oak, opened my sketchbook. I rubbed ash outward from leaf’s center, over edges and onto the page. A positive form of white negative space in leaf’s shape appeared, edged by the blackness of ash. Positive absence arose, analogous to that of the burned prairie where now there exists, in the absence of overwhelming leafy spurge, more space for a diversity of flora to thrive.

I collected samples of the still living plants within a stone’s throw of Small Oak. I believed I was making images of plants intended to and capable of surviving the burn. With time, I was gently corrected: land restoration is complicated. The burn crew hadn’t avoided setting the remaining plants aflame but had adjusted temperatures to a level that kept surrounding lands free of fire. Those low temps could not incinerate all plants.

This provided me with lessons in both complexity and humility.

That I was drawn to the ash made sense on more than a material level. I’d spent time in July with my 92-year-old mother as she slipped from the person I’d known into the chaos of illness and confusion. On the land where she lives, high winds had snapped trees rooted for decades, perhaps a century. A Mother Tree was lost. Wood was sawed and burned.

My ash drawings were also largely lost. By the time I’d walked them back to the hermitage, they’d migrated across my sketchbook pages into smears and clouds. I attempted to spray fix the remaining details, dab them, redraw them with a milk-based media. Futile work.

Rains came and weighted the ash on the field, bringing drawing to a halt.

In contrast, the living prairie and woodland plants’ sensory brilliance emerged. Flora bloomed in communion with community members’ care for them. We talked about rich layers of wild bergamot scent; forest showers of sound created by cicadids, crickets and frogs; buckthorn, dogwood and Solomon berry blues and purples. I entered into a current of conversations. People shared the plants they experienced as salient. We explored edges where human and plant lives meet. Community members generously detailed plant names, needs, histories, ways of thriving.

Inspired to reciprocate, I began making Cyanotype sun prints. I sought out the plants described to me, laid stems, blossoms, or leaves on Cyanotype treated paper, exposed them to sun, and rinsed them in water. Detailed images of the plants emerged as white silhouettes on blue grounds. I offered these as gifts to community members. I cooked small batches of wild inks made of elderberries, acorns, oak galls and buckthorn.

What rose up was collaboration on Cyanotype prints, making prints and playing with inks side by side and more talk about land and art. Each conversation emerged as a portrait of plant, person and currents running among us – including the values upheld by Holy Wisdom community members. This fusion became what I’ve been thinking of in recent days as a shared intangible, currents that may have as many names as there exist people, plants and other beings at Holy Wisdom.

My practice of making the Cyanotype prints did what art practice does well: immersed me in the co-arising, creative nature of a world that is vaster than the harms humans do. As I made prints, I deepened my relationship with the dynamics of non-duality. Absence became as much presentness as loss. Gifting the prints moved me into currents of abundance where giver and receiver exist together, at times undifferentiated.

I began to imagine how I might box all of this for the Holy Wisdom Monastery community members and offer it as a gift. Though my effort at this will fall short, I will deliver a box of Cyanotype supplies to the monastery for community members to check out of the library. It is a humble invitation to those interested to make, share and talk about prints as easily and routinely as they borrow, read and discuss books.

I know I will forget much of what I learned at Holy Wisdom: to be humble; to slow down and listen; to trust generosity that begets abundance; to offer hospitality that creates belongingness. I have already forgotten. I’ve rushed, been imposing and impatient, worried when it was not called for. But I know I will also recall what I’ve learned. This is my job as I welcome the new students enrolled in my courses: Art, Nature and Contemplative Photography, and Art & Flora. We’ll enter into relational art practices in collaboration with our shared natural world.

The alchemy among environments such as Holy Wisdom Monastery, the beings who tend and inhabit them and the power of relationally oriented art practices nurtures inspired responses. Inspired, a shared intangible is evoked, seems to insist on being shared, moves us beyond what we think we know. If we are fortunate, we grow more capable of facing loss and receiving abundance. We enter into expanding currents of creative possibility. I will be forever grateful for these experiences, offered by the community of communities at Holy Wisdom Monastery.

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