Future Nature: Cultivating the Conditions for Ongoingness presents lens-based documentation of an ecological artwork in West Texas that emerged from the fallow edge spaces of human-disturbed landscapes. Future Nature composts the conditions of these sites into teachings about resilience, livability, and multispecies collaboration in an increasingly hotter and drier climate.  

The work centers the autorewilding Honey Mesquite (Netulma Glandulosa) tree and its weedy companion plants of the endangered shortgrass prairie. The exhibition traces the assisted migration of these weedy plants from sites of production (agricultural land where endemic plants are considered a nuisance) to sites of nurturing and care: the tree-sparse urban center of Lubbock, TX.  

A quadrat is a four-sided figure which delimits the boundaries of a sample plot. A quadrat sampling has been widely used in plant studies to conduct data on species present in a sample area. We created three handmade Quadrat Paintings in the three primary colors (red, yellow and blue) and photographed 269 sample plots across Site 3 of the Mesquite Mile. Each Quadrat Painting utilizes photographic space to document the biodiversity of the Mesquite Mile project. When exhibited, the Quadrat Paintings printed at a 1:1 scale.