Every now and then, I have an urge to touch the trunk of a tree. To caress its bark, feeling its texture and its groundedness. An affectionate, impulsive gesture that fills me with calm assurance. Just as that tree is rooted, so can I be, and we will grow and grow. Gather brings together Russell Banx, Catherine Desroches, and Jennifer Rose Sciarrino with work that seeks sensitive interconnections and porous thresholds between human and natural worlds. Their contributions herald expanded collective consciousness and communion. Palm to bark. 

Banx’s graphite on gesso panels depicts human subjects who appear lost in a deep connection with their accompanying surroundings. In Climbers (all 2025), two climbers clutch onto a tree’s limbs and share the moon’s perspective. A figure traverses a landscape in Drumlin and later sleeps cradled by it in Daisy, devotedly holding a flower throughout. Another sits in dialogue with Moth as flora curls in to listen. In these, Banx bridges the affective introspection of his earlier work with a broader ecological consciousness and curiosity. His pencil follows a desire to emotionally connect with the more-than-human world through good intentions, care, and consideration, in turn strengthening our inner and outer environments. 

Drawing for Desroches is an act of loving and conscious attention towards the vastness of life, where imagination is an ethic that can generate a sensitive relationship with one’s immediate environment and understanding of one’s role within it. Their work pursues an interplay of mind, body, and landscape, a dynamic that attempts to anchor personal memory to a broader, older, political, and telluric collective memory. This sense of grounded endurance and tenderness is evident throughout Desroches’s works, like in the gentle eyes and gestures of Lune du Castor (all 2025) and L’ oeil du printemps and the protective shroud of ta propre médecine. The scenes feel out of time and any time, while always of the earth, aligning with Desroches’s belief that energy is a great memory which leaves traces in living matter.   

For Sciarrino, it is locating that very trace that propels her buoy series (2021). Gathered in each mesh basket are rock groupings sourced from Ontario that range in geologic age and memory, finding reciprocity in Desroches’s Êtres au Monde. Sciarrino carved each one down until she unveiled the shape and form of yeast. Yeast, a unicellular organism, is abundant in nature, in mutations, and in its intersections with humans, from food to infection, revealing the limitations of human-attempted control. In buoy, Sciarrino considers how, through acts of synergy, simple organisms communicate together, resulting in new patterns of shared intelligence and ever-shifting symbiotic change. This propelling entanglement continues in her Swan series (2021, 2025) in which various stones are carved to resemble organisms, seeds, and spores. Pairings are nestled together to express communication, care, and mutualism. 

clutch, Sciarrino’s newest addition to Swan, carves alabaster into the shape of a shark egg, colloquially known as a “mermaid’s purse,” and sets it holding a marble seedpod or “shepherd’s purse.” Each contains cells of distinct information that here, by imagination, bring land and sea together. Clutching each other, given names of endearment, is it so far from palm to bark?

— Clara May Puton