During the summers of 2017 and 2019, I joined two friends, fisherman Elsa Sebastian and biologist Natalie Dawson to document the last stands of ancient trees and the impacts of logging in Alaska’s temperate rainforest. We traveled slowly on foot, focusing our attention on Taan Island, Elsa’s home and the third largest island in the U.S. (also called Prince of Wales Island). Heavily scarred by extractive industry, this island has the highest density of clearcutting anywhere on the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Locals say you can’t go a mile without encountering a clear cut, and despite damages from over 60 years of industrial logging, the island is also home to some of the region’s largest trees—cedar, spruce and hemlock, growing uninterrupted since the last ice age. 

These paintings grew out of the shared practice of groundtruthing. They are a record of my time as a visitor, of the time we spent bushwhacking in the rain, following the faint trails of bears, wolves and deer. They emerged from the conversations we had with friends, fishermen, conservationists and community leaders living and working in this fractured landscape. 

Categorizing the objects by color allows me to show the human and more-than-human all together on the same page, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and the natural world. This organization, combined with the visual language of scientific illustration, challenges historic western taxonomy. I left the objects unnamed to leave space for not knowing all the answers. I thought about our common ancestors, our relatedness to other forms of life, how we are all made up of essentially the same things. I thought about how losing a species of mud shrimp to extinction also means the loss of a particular shade of blue.

See more in Understory, a film by Wild Confluence Media and Elsa Sebastian

This work was supported by Alaska Audubon, the community of Tenakee Springs on Chichagof Island, the writer-activist Kathleen Dean Moore and the Salmon House residency