Kristin Leachman

I use my practice to explore the intersection of painting and the natural world. In my ongoing series Xylem Rays, I paint the self-organizing patterns that emerge from trees’ vascular tissue, known as xylem. The Xylem Rays paintings require prolonged visits to forest lands and sustained periods of reflection and study in my studio. Informed by both my own metaphysical connection to and physical dependence upon nature, I make nearly photorealistic representational paintings of xylem that, due to the inherent formal characteristics of their subjects, read like biomorphic abstractions. Together, the paintings in the Xylem Rays series depict the natural history of the landscapes from which they emerge, written in the unspoken language of the structural integrity and biological resilience of trees.