This photograph was the result of an artistic play day, and it marked the beginning of my entire Conversations With Nature series. On a Friday in November 2017, I took my usual morning walk outside and came home with a round dandelion seed head that was not missing a single seed – a perfect globe. Since I did not have a dedicated studio at the time, I brought the dandelion into my dining room and set about taking a photo of the perfect globe of seeds. Instead I found, annoyingly, that the seeds just lifted off and floated down to the table. What to do? I tried to put them back, one by one, and I found that the disarray of the replaced pieces appealed to me. After a while, I stripped all the seeds off and put them back, finding ways to get them to stick to each other and create a new form. I had to wrap a scarf around my mouth so my breath wouldn’t blow them away. What you see here is my final shape, with one last seed extending almost to the table below. It looked to me like the elongated reaching of a ballerina in a pointe shoe, and I captured the photo seconds before a final collapse. As I processed the images and darkened out the background so that only the seed heads could be seen, I ruminated over the experience. I had brought nature indoors — essentially ruined its natural beauty and then tried to put it back together. Wasn’t that essentially what much of humanity was doing every day? My experience felt symbolic of our human existence on earth, and so the series was born. If we take nature apart and we put it back together again, what will we have?

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