ROOTED – Exploring Our Connection with Nature invites you to slow down and reconnect with the natural world through the eyes of artists who work across painting, ceramics, photography, and mixed media. Their work reveals the quiet power of attention—transforming shells, stones, landscapes, and light into portals for reflection and meaning. This exhibition encourages you to see nature not just as scenery, but as a source of wisdom, wonder, and belonging.

ARTISTS IN SHOW:

• Chris Clamp (realistic detailed shells)
• Elizabeth Ross (photographic nature paintings)
• Kate Robinson (fantastical geological Icelandic sketches)
• Leighton Ford (spiritual landscapes)
• Marek Ranis (geological rock cliffs & Mars, environmental)
• Hitomi Shibata (Seagrove ceramics, naturally sourced clays)

Curatorial Exhibition Statement: 

We invite you into a world where nature is not just seen but engaged with–where the surface beauty of land, water, stone, and sky opens a deeper dialogue about presence, memory, and meaning. This exhibition gathers a diverse group of artists whose practices are grounded in careful observation and reverence for the natural world. Their mediums vary—painting, ceramics, photography, mixed media—but their impulse is shared: to slow down, to pay attention, and to create from a place of wonder. Whether through the gleam of a shell, the fracture lines in a granite cliff, the layering of clay from the North Carolina earth, or the mystical pull of Iceland’s coastline, these works reflect a profound sensitivity to the world around us. They ask us not only to look, but to feel.

In today’s fast-paced world, stillness and reflection often feel out of reach. This exhibition urges us to reengage our senses and curiosity. What happens when we begin to see the land as story, as teacher, as mirror? These artists show us that making art is an act of care, of noticing, of responding. From the solitude of a retreat in Appalachia to the collaborative energy of scientific fieldwork, their art embodies a courageous attentiveness—to beauty, to ecological crisis, to the sacred and unseen. ROOTED is more than a visual experience; it is a call to reclaim our connection with the natural world, and in doing so, to find clarity, meaning, and resilience in our own journey.