Teagan White is an artist and outsider naturalist whose work arises from direct experience with natural phenomena and dedicated communication with the land. Through careful observation and poetic allegory, their paintings explore regional ecological issues such as drought, wildfire, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss, as well as the universal spiritual and psychosomatic burden of our acquiescence to a necrotic, extractivist civilization.
Bleak only at surface level, their work is saturated with the conviction that other, stranger, and more beautiful ways of engaging with the world are not only possible but limitless, and that solutions won’t be found through exclusionary conservation, technocratic fantasies, or neocolonial exploitation, but through a return to devoted kinship with all beings.
Though influenced by many years in the Midwest, Teagan currently lives in and makes work about the Pacific Northwest, where multitudes of licorice fern surge and wane in tandem with the rain, and dead seabirds sometimes wash up at their feet.
The forest of the mind dies with the one outside.
— Jesse Narens
For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to forget how to step into the river. For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to step only into their own ideas. Will these poor creatures survive all this unlearning? Will the river survive all this forgetting?
— Max Cafard
Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe… What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things.
— Henry David Thoreau
and behold we are caught up in the sacred
whirling primordial streaming
at the renewal of everything.
— Aimé Césaire
All at once is what eternity is
— Kenneth Patchen