{"id":12143,"date":"2025-12-27T20:06:52","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T00:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/artist-ash-eliza-williamss-reveries-of-wonder-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-12-27T20:06:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T00:06:52","slug":"artist-ash-eliza-williamss-reveries-of-wonder-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/artist-ash-eliza-williamss-reveries-of-wonder-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Ash Eliza Williams\u2019s Reveries of Wonder \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cOur origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,\u201d wrote<\/a> Rachel Carson. \u201cOur world, and the worlds around and within it,\u201d wrote<\/a> Sy Montgomery a generation later, \u201cis aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom\u2026 far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

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There are people whose eye is more sharply focused on those brilliances, whose ear is more finely tuned to the murmurations of the mountains and the oceans and the trees, whose orientation to the world is more tenderly in touch with our creaturely origins. Some of them become artists, some scientists, and some boundary-spanners who refuse the divide, who know that to partition our ways of seeing is to keep ourselves from apprehending the magnificent whole. <\/p>\n

Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a child so shy as to dream of being able to communicate via bioluminescence, Ash Eliza Williams<\/a> came to realize that, lacking the luciferin necessary for the language of light, the human animal has evolved its own alchemical means of silent communication: art. <\/p>\n

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Animated by \u201ca fascination with alternative languages and methods of connection,\u201d Williams draws on medieval bestiaries and geophysics, on 19th-century zoological illustrations and graphic novels, to conjure up the wonder Rachel Carson insisted<\/a> is our inheritance and our best protection from ourselves. Emanating from the paintings and sculptures are the \u201cendless forms most beautiful and most wonderful\u201d that enchanted Darwin \u2014 from bioluminescent moths to the bat (that living triumph of the possible over the probable<\/a>), from chlorophyl (that ongoing mystery<\/a> of chemistry and chance) to clouds (those abiding spells against indifference<\/a>) \u2014 arranged in series whose very titles are miniature poems, titles like Urgent Beings<\/em><\/a> and The History of Weather<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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One<\/a> began as a book about Rachel Carson and instead became a series of durational paintings about the lives of different creatures \u2014 a starling, a violet-eared waxbill, an orange fruit-dove, a hickory tree \u2014 using the graphic novel format to explore their experience of time, \u201cto think,\u201d Williams writes, \u201cabout the expansiveness or endlessness of a creature\u2019s Umwelt.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Thoroughly enchanted as I am by all of this work, none thrills me more than Williams\u2019s painted reveries of lichen, that uncommon teacher in how to be better humans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Radiating from it all is what may be the most fruitful orientation a person can have to a world \u2014 an obsessive yet spacious curiosity that, through the pinhole of the minutest details, reveals the grandeur of the big picture. \u201cThe whole is simpler than its parts,\u201d<\/a> observed the visionary physicist Willard Gibbs in what remains the finest koan of science, but it is only by attending closely and with a great kindness to the parts, discrete yet intertwined by threads of ceaseless silent communication, that we can contact the majesty and mystery of the whole.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n