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)ologies of you and i is an exploration of how ecological shifts can be tracked, remembered, and embodied through place-based artmaking. Phenology—the study of seasonal cycles, rhythms, and bloom times—meets phenomenology—the study of lived experience—becoming, together, a practice of attunement to the rhythms of the earth and the textures of being alive within them.
The local ecologies I move within, alongside the garden I tend each day, become both observatory and archive: sites for tracking seasonal change and reflecting on its embodied impact. Through plantcraft, plants become record and material. They become pigment—drought deepening or dulling color, heat reshaping bloom and yield. They become paper—native and introduced species documenting migration, adaptation, and displacement within handmade field journals.
Through ecoprinting, dye-making, pigment work, and other plant-based processes, these materials form a visual language of climate and memory. Omen gestures toward what these shifts foretell.
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Phenology is the study of rhythm and cyclic change in the natural world. Bloom times, migrations, emergences act as a signal for plants, animals, and ecological phenomena. It is the study of how ecological and climatic shifts ripple across living systems.
Phenomenology is the study of lived experience, a philosophy of meaning-making rooted in presence and perception.
An omen is a portent, a sign, and 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 arriving too early, pollinators too late. The once-reliable rhythms of plants, animals, and seasons begin to fray. 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 ecological understanding, and art that traces the felt experience of seasonal disruption on human bodies and emotional worlds, the lifeworlds we co-create together.
At its core, the project asks how climate change can be seen and felt through material and color. In my dye garden, and in the places I harvest as a guest, plants become both medicine and medium. Their hues shift with changing conditions—drought dulling tansy’s yellow, heatwaves altering woad’s depth, early frost cutting goldenrod short. Through eco-printing, dye-making, pigment work, and paper-making with both native and introduced plant fibers, I create handmade surfaces that hold these changes. Other plantcraft practices I am recently exploring, such as weaving and cordage, extend this inquiry, working with metaphors of repair and webs of interconnection. Phenology wheels chart bloom, decay, weather, and chromatic variation, translating scientific observation into wheels and calendars that hold time as both data and devotion.These material studies become a living ecological archive: and for me, a field guide through which climate disruption is made visible.
What changes in me, in a changing climate?