08/11/2025
East Troublesome Burn Scar, Rocky Mountain National Park
Holy moly, it’s done! I don’t think I quite realized what I was getting myself into when I started this piece back in early April. I intentionally chose to use a smaller hoop that my first big thread painting for Olympic so it wouldn’t take me quite as long, and all told this piece for Rocky Mountain took me easily 350 hours to stitch. (Olympic took ~250 hours for reference).
This piece feels like a culmination of years of work on my creative practice as well as my career in the natural resources. My very first natural resources job was as a forest restoration monitoring tech (shoutout to CFRI!) where I feel in love with botany and spent three summers identifying plants across Colorado to help inform forest restoration practices to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Part of that monitoring work involved going into burn areas of varying severity to look at what sorts of plants were coming back.
Spending time in the East Troublesome Burn Scar last summer during my art residency stirred up a lot of those memories, and in a world with increasing extreme fire behavior, I think that I have to choose to look ahead, rather than dwelling on what was lost.
So in making this piece, I focused on the regrowth, on the wildflowers yearning for the sun, the knee height Aspen and lodgepole that were finally getting their chance to sprout. The progression of nature is not a straight line, but a circle, and in the face of disturbance she always finds a way to begin again.
