On the afternoon of April 8, 2022, interdisciplinary artist and amateur lichenologist Ashley Eliza Williams met with Art Lead of Paperbark Literary Magazine Trevor Leach for an interview about her creative practice. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited and condensed for publication.

TREVOR LEACH

I was wondering if you could take us on a walk through your imagination and tell us what are some of the places that you get your inspiration from?

ASHLEY ELIZA WILLIAMS

Oh, wow! It starts with this very simple fascination with the natural world and a kind of a deep sense of wonder. I was a super shy kid, and I became really envious of other creatures and how other creatures can communicate in different ways without using language—without using human language. So I'm really curious about the ways that trees use mycorrhizal networks to talk to each other, the ways that butterflies use color flashes, the way birds use dance, and all of the different methods of connection: echolocation and chemical signaling. All of my work is about perception, too. A deep kind of looking. 

I go on a lot of walks and pick up a lot of rocks and look to see what's underneath. I travel around with my little magnifying glass and try to look at things really closely. And I’m always reading, too, about ecology and linguistics and perception, and lots of great fiction as well. So I am often listening to audiobooks while I sketch. I'm pulling from stories, too.

LEACH

So it seems like curiosity is a big part of what drives you?

WILLIAMS

Yeah! That's the best thing about being an artist. It's an excuse to be curious about things, to get deeper into the things you're curious about. And then, you can ask all kinds of people questions about all of these things.  And, strangely, if you tell them you're an artist they'll start telling you all their stories! 

LEACH

Totally, yeah! That speaks to how relationships and communication are important to your work, and I'm wondering if that informs how you think about your role of being an artist in society? Like the idea of communication between species, but between objects and across disciplines. Being an artist is like being a communicator in that way.

WILLIAMS

I think I'm really interested in the weirdness of our desire to connect with the non-human. Why do we have this drive? And questions about what language actually is, or what communication actually is, and the kind of poetry that happens when you can't quite connect. And the weird things that happen in between when we're trying to find the right word or we’re trying to orient ourselves. And I think a big part of being an artist is about being in that space of not quite getting there and finding some kind of beauty in the trying.

LEACH

I think that totally makes sense. That ambiguity also shows in how your lichen works—they're lichen, but they're also these abstract paintings, in a way. I'm thinking of Vance Kirkland or someone like that: he did works of these cosmic explosions. They're abstract, but they're based in this scientific reality. I'm wondering if you think about it like that?

WILLIAMS

I mean, I love looking closely at patterns and trying to understand the way things grow, and then going back into my studio and not looking at anything, just thinking, just having those patterns in my brain and trying to build something new. And I think some of this leads to imagining an alternate utopian future. What will happen if we somehow don't destroy all the plants and animals? What if everything continues to evolve? What extraordinary things might we see in the future? So this line of thinking gives me an excuse to play with all these different elements, and I can start to build something that's a little bit more abstract. 

I also think some of the abstraction is about trying to search for the essence of something. I often start with a combination of words. How do I make a painting that's really, really warm? Or really fuzzy? Or really, really anxious? Or really, really alive? And then I'll try to make something that looks just extremely alive and extremely fuzzy, and I’ll try to push that as hard as I can. If that makes any sense at all. 

LEACH

Yeah, that's great. That's really great. Do you think that the process of making changes the way that you see the world?

WILLIAMS

Yes. Part of it is just feeling like I want everything, you know? I go for a walk in the woods and I want all the mushrooms, I want all the trees, I want all the grasses, and as an artist I can take them and do things with them without having to, you know, remove them from the landscape or burn them as a resource. I think there's probably this primal urge to use up resources in nature, and maybe, as artists, we can take photographs of things and think about things, and collect those images in our brains, and then make new things without having to destroy the things. That’s my hope.  

LEACH

I think that's really beautiful, especially since some of your works include found objects but also sculptural elements. How do you see material as further enhancing the intention behind your work?

WILLIAMS

I’m a very tactile person, so whenever I go into the woods I'm always petting all the mosses, touching all the trees, and I feel like that's how I learn about things. So sculpture is just—I love the process of kind of building a thing, making a thing, working with clay. And then I'm also really interested in museum displays and natural history, like the history of displays and scientific illustration, how we decide what is the specimen and what is the illustration. How we categorize things and organize nature in a very specific way that is influenced by our complex and problematic history. The sculpture and the painting relationship is me playing with that idea. I can make these little shelves, and that's very satisfying, and I think it gets at this idea—maybe, hopefully—of interspecies communication, too. Maybe a sculpture is a different kind of creature than a painting or drawing? They're trying to have some kind of weird conversation across that space.

LEACH

What do you see as the distinction, if any, between art and science, in your practice especially? 

WILLIAMS

I am definitely an artist who wants to be a scientist. I love that there are people who will dedicate their entire lives to studying one small little creature or one very small idea about a very specific creature living in a very specific place on a very specific rock. That makes me feel really hopeful about the future!  But, you know, most scientists do have to focus, and get really, really deep and really understand this being or this thing, whatever they're studying. As artists we can explore tangents and play around with abstract ideas. I think my brain is actually more of an artist’s brain. Even though I want to be a scientist, I think I’m too drawn to tangents. I get too distracted.

LEACH

Your work almost creates this mystical experience and it changes the way that I look at lichen. Do you think that experience is entirely separate from the way that science changes the way you look at the world as well?

WILLIAMS

Yeah, that's a good point. I think as artists, we can imagine. We don't have to follow all the rules, right? We don't have to follow the scientific method. We can kind of imagine what it might feel like to be a rock, and we won't get in trouble for it, which is nice.

LEACH

When you think about environmental art, there's this idea of the sublime. What are your thoughts on the sublime in your work and this connection with landscape painting?

WILLIAMS

Turner was one of the first artists who captured my heart when I was young. I love playing with the push and pull between fear and seduction, you know, seduction and aversion. I made one painting of my own hand holding a centipede, and the hand looked a little bit vulnerable, and you feel—I would think—a little bit scared for the person, and also the creature, but yet there's kind of the sweetness to it, too. I like playing with that kind of space. 

And I'm curious about our relationship with landscape through time and how we deal with those feelings of fear and danger, and what that even means right now, in our world. We used to be kind of terrified of the tall sharp mountain peaks, and now nature should be terrified of us. So there's this flip. But I also just love stormy dark landscapes with faint little suns trying to struggle their way through.

LEACH

I definitely see this connection going back to Turner. A lot of those artists were kind of resisting this rise of industrialization, and here we are kind of dealing with the consequences. I'm wondering what are some of the ways that the climate crisis impacts your work?

WILLIAMS

I mean, it started from an early age. I guess this story is not so much about the climate crisis, but it's about environmental destruction. 

I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, and my parents had a small store that they ran. This is a long story; I'll try to tell it fast. So they had a little store and the school bus would drop me off there, but I had to walk through a long stretch of woods to get to the store, and the path through the woods was through this beautiful patch of mountain. There were deer and beavers and a little stream, and it was a really beautiful place. 

And one day there was a rope around it, you know, caution tape around it, and they leveled the whole area, destroyed it, and it became a strip mall. So that had a huge impact on me as a 12-year-old. And I also read Watership Down during that time. I don't know if you know that book?

LEACH

The rabbits, right?

WILLIAMS

Yeah, the rabbit story by Richard Adams. That story combined with that experience I think changed a lot of things for me and turned me into a baby environmentalist. My grandparents lived in West Virginia, and whenever I went to visit them, we would see brutal mountaintop removal strip mining. So I'd see these beautiful mountains one trip, and then the next trip the tops would be leveled off.  

And then I moved to Colorado, and after my first week there, there were forest fires raging. That was something I did not experience at all on the East Coast. It was a major shock. That whole first summer, I just painted smoke. That's all I painted, non-stop for an entire summer, because it filled my mind and my dreams, and there was nothing else I could do. We were very close to being evacuated many times. There was always this threat of fire in Colorado when I was there—which you have experienced as well, I’m sure.

LEACH

Oh, yeah. Even before the pandemic, I had bought masks for days where the pollution and the smoke were just so bad. Such a powerful, horrible thing.

WILLIAMS

To expand on that in my own work, the most recent project that I've been making are portable paintings. They’re these paintings of abstracted rocks covered in lichen that I'm carrying around with me and bringing into the woods. I'm thinking about migration: the forced migration of plants and animals and people because of climate change, and how entire forests are having to move. And they are moving—which is beautiful and poetic and fascinating and terrifying, all of those things.

LEACH

Speaking of that, have you noticed any changes in your practice, moving from different environments?

WILLIAMS

Yes, definitely. My work is always a response to the environment that I'm living in, for sure. But I'm also really interested in the memories, the memories of landscapes. I have dreams about Colorado all the time, dreams about Virginia. And the newer paintings with footnotes are kind of about internal landscapes or interior landscapes—I'm writing about dreamed landscapes in relationship with real landscapes and how our experience of a place is always seen through a lens of all the other places we’ve been before. And so part of it is about the immediate landscape. The other part is a remembered landscape from the past, including landscapes that are dangerous or even traumatic in very personal ways. But yeah, when I moved from Virginia to Colorado, like I said, those forest fires took over everything. And then I became obsessed with lichens. In Colorado—especially in Fort Collins, where I lived and taught for a little while—all the rocks are exposed. You can see lichens everywhere. They're gorgeous. I had to start painting them because they were so wonderful. And now that I'm here in Massachusetts, how did it change? I think I'm probably bringing more greens back into my paintings. Squishy, humid greens that I missed so much in Colorado.

LEACH

I also like the field notes. Is that kind of a series-in-progress?

WILLIAMS

That's definitely a series-in-progress. I think I'll be continuing to work on the field notes for a long, long time. And they're all going to be in a solo show in the Hudson Valley in July. It's going to be an all works-on-paper show, which is so exciting. I've never done an all works-on-paper show, and I love paper. So I'm excited about this. It will be a massive collection of field notes filling up space.