by Nastassja Noell

Spaces Between Branches

Nastassja Noell | Mar 2025 | Issue 43

To me, art is a way of thinking that transcends words and time. Art digs beneath meanings. Art breaks through walls. This happens not just for the artist in process, but for the viewer as well, if they are willing to enter into an inner dialogue with the artwork. But what is thought if it’s not encased in words or time, but rather ever-unfolding in forms, colors, melodies, and movement? That’s the koan that I work with when I’m co-creating with the wild landscapes around me.

Nastassja Noell, *Spaces Between Branches: Blue,* oil on birch panel, 20 × 16 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

The Spaces Between the Branches series came through me when I was going through a chronic acute Epstein Barr flare-up. My forest walks during these times are slow, I often only make it a few feet before I need to lie down, sometimes for hours, waiting until energy pulses through me again. For years, I felt like I was trapped alive inside a sleeping body. But lying down in wild landscapes throughout Turtle Island taught me a deep learning: that my imagination is not just mine, that my imagination is played by the ecosystems around me, the wind, the forests, the meadows, the lichens. Over the years, my work shifted from conducting lichen biodiversity inventories across Turtle Island, into a practice of tuning the instrument of my being and conversing with the wilds through art, writing, and ritual movement.

Lichens have been my guide in this transformation. Lichens are symbiotic organisms, emergent organisms formed by algae and fungi. There is no cell or spore or strand of DNA that can be pointed to as a lichen: it’s the space between the algae and fungi that is the lichen. It is the space between you and your partner that is love. It is the space between our consciousness and the collective unconscious that is our self. These spaces are malleable, changeable, dynamically shifting like the spaces between the branches of a tree—but as tangible as a lichen held in the palm of your hand.

In these paintings, I focused first on the spaces, and secondly on the branches. These paintings are a meditation on what happens when we center the shape of our relationships instead of only selves.

Nastassja Noell (she/they) is a lichenologist who traverses outside the fenced pastures of science. As a biologist, painter, and writer, her work grapples with the collapse of ecosystems and the reality of living on stolen indigenous lands. Nastassja’s artworks are dialogues with the wisdom of living systems breathing in the forests, deserts and sidewalk cracks around us. Her creative writing and artwork have been published by the Dark Mountain Project and other venues; her flash fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize; and she is a recipient of the United Plant Savers’ Deep Ecology Artists Fellowship. She has led lichen biodiversity research projects throughout the Americas, co-authored the book Delmarva Lichens (Torrey Botanical Press), and her science writing has appeared in various scientific journals as well as Radical Mycology, Patagon Journal, and NW Travel. Nastassja lives in the Southern Appalachians on the ancestral lands of the Cherokee People. She’s the Registration Director for Firefly Gathering and is currently working on an MFA in Studio Art at Western Carolina University.