What changes in me in a changing climate? How are living systems responding to more regular disruptions to seasonal shifts? How am I?
Phen(omen)ology of you and i is a reflection of how ecological shifts can be tracked, remembered, and embodied through color. Phenology—the study of seasonal cycles, rhythms, and bloom times—meets phenomenology—the study of lived experience—becoming together a practice in attuning to rhythms of the earth and lived experience. The dye garden becomes both observatory and archive for tracking seasonal change and the reflecting on these embodied experiences. . Plants are grown not only as food and medicine, but as pigments that record change: drought altering dye intensity, heat reshaping bloom patterns. Through ecoprinting, dye-making, and pigment experiments, these colors form visual languages of climate and memory. Omen enters as the whisper of what these changes foretell. Phenology wheels chart bloom, decay, and weather as both scientific record and poetic gesture, translating what’s often understood as the invisible process of climate change into shifting tones—an atlas of color, time, and transformation.
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Phenology is the study of rhythm and cyclic change in the natural world—bloom times, migrations, emergences—those signals that tie plants, animals, and climate into delicate synchrony. It asks how ecological and climatic shifts impact living beings.
Phenomenology is the study of lived experience, a philosophy of meaning-making rooted in presence and perception.
An omen—a portent, a sign—offers warning.
In phen(omen)ologies of you and i, I spend time with the phenology of things: attending to a plant’s bloom time in relationship to cicada emergence, butterfly migration, or the dawn chorus of birds. I notice how, under a changing climate, these synchronies falter. Blooms arrive too early, pollinators too late. The once-reliable rhythms of plants, animals, and seasons are disrupted. What does this dissonance mean for our interdependent webs of life?
This project holds these observations through field notes, photographs, sketches, and contributions to community science efforts such as Nature’s Notebook and the National Phenology Network. It is both record and reflection: data that challenges current ecological management, and art that traces the felt impact of seasonal disruption on human bodies and our mental well-beings.
At its core, the project asks how climate change can be seen and felt through color. In my dye garden and in places I harvest as a guest, plants become both medicine and pigment, their hues altered by shifting conditions—drought dulling marigold’s yellow, heatwaves altering indigo’s intensity, early frost cutting goldenrod short. Through eco-printing, dye-making, and pigment experiments, I understand color as a living ecological archive: a palette that makes climate disruption visible. Phenology wheels chart these chromatic shifts, turning scientific record into wheels, circles, mandalas.
phen(omen)ologies of you and i becomes both a scientific practice and a poetic inquiry—a way of asking: What colors emerge from climate change? What changes in me, in a changing climate?